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ON 



Heroes, Hero-Worship 

AND 

The Heroic in History 



Thomas Carlyle 



ARTIST'S EDITION-. WITH NUMEROUS NEIU ILL USTRA TIONS 



Corwin Knapp Linsoii and A. Gunn 




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NEW YORK 

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 









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Coppdgbt, 1S93, 
JBs 3fteDevick B, Stoker Company* 



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CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 

PAGE 

The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian 

Mythology i 

LECTURE IL 
The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam 47 

LECTURE in. 
The Hero as Poet. Dante ; Shakspeare 87 

LECTURE IV. 

The Hero as Priest. Luther; Reformation: Knox; 

Puritanism 128 

LECTURE V. 

The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, 
^^ Burns , 171 

LECTURE VI. 

The Hero as King. Cromwell, Napoleon : Modern 

Revolutionism 217 



Nummary and Index. • 271,283 

ill 



i 




'>i' *•-/" ( { 







ODiN.—Pa£-e 4. 



ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE 
HEROIC IN HISTORY. 



LECTURE I. 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. ODIN. PAGANISM: SCANDINAVIAN 

MYTHOLOGY. 

[Tuesday, 5th May, /5^0.] 

WE have undertaken to discourse here for a little on 
Great Men, their manner of appearance in our world's 
business, how they have shaped themselves in the world's 
history, what ideas men formed of them, what work they did ; 
— on Heroes, namely, and on their reception and perform- 
ance; what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human 
affairs. Too evidently this is a large topic ; deserving quite 
other treatment than v/e can expect to give it at present. 
A large topic ; indeed, an illimitable one ; wide as Universal 
History itself. For, as I take it, Universal History, the 
history of what man has accomplished in this world, is 
at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked 
here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones ; the 
modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of what- 
soever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain ; 
all things that we see standing accomplished in the world 
are properly the outer ;naterial result, the practical reali* 

1 



zation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwell in the Great 
Men sent into the world : the soul of the whole world's 
history, it may justly be considered, were the history of 
these. Too clearly it is a topic we shall do no justice to in 
this place ! 

One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are 
profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, 
upon a great man, without gainmg something by him. He 
is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to 
be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened 
the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp 
only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of 
Heaven ; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native original 
insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness ; — in whose 
radiance all souls feel that it is well with them. On any 
terms whatsoever, you will not grudge to wander in such 
neighborhood for a while. These Six classes of Heroes, 
chosen out of widely distant countries and epochs, and in 
mere external figure differing altogether, ought, if we look 
faithfully at them, to illustrate several things for us. Could 
we see them well, we should get some glimpses into the very 
marrow of the world's history. How happy, could I but, in 
any measure, in such times as these, make manifest to you 
the meanings of Heroism ; the divine relation (for I may 
well call it such) which in all times unites a Great Man to 
other men ; and thus, as it were, not exhaust my subject, 
but so much as break ground on it ! At all events, I must 
make the attempt. 

It is well said, in every sense, that a man's rehgion is the 
chief fact with regard to him. A man's, or a nation of 
men's. By rehgion I do not mean here the church-creed 
which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign, 




^^ 



PAGAN EMPIRE OF FORCE DISPLACED BY A NOBLER SUPREMACY," — Page 3. 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 3 

and, in words or otherwise, assert ; not this wholly, in many 
cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed 
creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthless- 
ness under each or any of them. This is not what I call 
religion, this profession and assertion ; which is often only 
a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, 
from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep 
as that. But the thing a man does practically beheve (and 
this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, 
much less to others) ; the thing a man does practically lay 
to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations 
to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, 
that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively 
determines all the rest. That is his religionj or, it may 
be, his mere scepticism and no-religion : the manner it is 
in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the 
Unseen World or No-World ; and I say, if you tell me what 
that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, 
what the kind of things he will do is. Of a man or of a 
nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they 
had ? Was it Heathenism, — plurality of gods, mere sensu- 
ous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief 
recognized element therein Physical f'orce ? Was it Chris- 
tianism ; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the 
only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, 
resting on Eternity ; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a 
nobler supremacy, that of Holiness ? Was it Scepticism, 
uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen 
World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one ; — doubt as 
to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial ? Answering 
of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the 
man or nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of 
the actions they did; their feelings were parents of theii 



4 LECTURES OJV HEROES. 

thoughts : it was the unseen and spiritual in them that 
determined the outward and actual ; — their religion, as I say, 
was the great fact about them. In these Discourses, limited 
as we are, it will be good to direct our survey chiefly to that 
religious phasis of the matter. That once known well, 
all is known. We have chosen as the first Hero in our 
series, Odin the central figure of Scandinavian Paganism ; 
an emblem to us of a most extensive province of things. 
Let us look for a little at the Hero as Divinity, the oldest 
primary form of Heroism. 

Surely it seems a very strange-looking thing, this Pagan- 
ism ; almost inconceivable to us in these days. A bewilder- 
ing, inextricable jungle of delusions, confusions, falsehoods 
and absurdities, covering the whole field of Life ! A thing 
that fills us with astonishment, almost, if it were possible, 
with incredulity, — for truly it is not easy to understand that 
sane men could ever calmly, with their eyes open, believe 
and live by such a set of doctrines. , That men should have 
worshipped their poor fellow-man as a God, and not him only, 
but stocks and stones, and all manner of animate and inani- 
mate objects ; and fashioned for themselves such a distracted 
chaos of hallucinations by way of Theory of the Universe : 
all this looks like an incredible fable. Nevertheless it is a 
clear fact that they did it. Such hideous inextricable jungle 
of misworships, misbeliefs, men, made as we are, did actually 
hold by, and live at hom.e in. This is strange. Yes, we may 
pause in sorrow and silence over the depths of darkness that 
are in man ; if we rejoice in the heights of purer vision he 
has attained to. Such things were and are in man ; in all 
men; in us too. 

Some speculators have a short way of accounting for the 
Pagan religion : mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say 
^hey5 no sane man ever did believe it, — merely contrived to 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 5 

persuade other men, not worthy of the name of sane, to be- 
lieve it ! It will be often our duty to protest against this sort 
of hypothesis about men's doings and history ; and I here, 
on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Pagan- 
ism, and to all other isms by which man has ever for a length 
of time striven to walk in this world. They have all had a 
truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. 
Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in 
the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have 
fearfully abounded : but quackery was never the originating 
influence in such things ; it was not the health and life of 
such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their 
being about to die ! Let us never forget this. It seems to 
me a most mournful hypothesis, that of quackery giving birth 
to any faith, even in savage men. Q\^ackery gives birth to 
nothing ; gives death to all thinsfs. We shall not see into 
the true heart of any thing, if we look merely at the quack- 
eries of it ; if we do not reject the quackeries altogether; as 
mere diseases, corruptions, with which our and all men's 
sole duty is to have done with them, to sweep them out of 
our thoughts as out of our practice. Man everywhere is the 
born enemy of lies. I find Grand Lamaism itself to have a 
kind of truth in it. Read the candid, clear-sighted, rather scep- 
tical Mr. Turner's Account of his Embassy to that country, 
and see. They have their belief, these poor Thibet people, 
that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself 
into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of 
Pope ! At bottom still better, belief that there is a Greatest 
Man ; that he is discoverable ; that, once discovered, we ought 
to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds ! This 
is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is 
the only error here. The Thibet priests have methods of 
their own of discovering what Man is Greatest, fit to be 



6 LECTURES ON- HEROES. 

supreme over them. Bad methods : but are they so much 
worse than our methods, — of understanding him to be always 
the eldest-born of a certain genealogy ? Alas, it is a difficult 

thing to find good methods for ! We shall begin to have a 

chance of understanding Paganism, when we first admit that 
to its followers it was, at one time, earnestly true. Let us 
consider it very certain that men did believe in Paganism; 
men with open e3^es, sound senses, men made altogether like 
ourselves ; that we, had we been there, should have believed 
in it. Ask now, What Paganism could have been ? 

Another theory, somewhat more respectable, attributes such 
things to Allegory. It was a play of poetic minds, say these 
theorists; a shadowing forth, in allegorical fable, in personi- 
fication and visual form, of what such poetic minds had 
known and felt of this Universe. Which agrees, add they, 
with a primary law of human nature, still everywhere observ- 
ably at work, though in less important things. That what a 
man feels intensely, he struggles to speak out of him, to see 
represented before him in visual shape, and as if with a kind 
of life and historical reality in it. Now doubtless there is such 
a law, and it is one of the deepest in human nature ; neither 
need we doubt that it did operate fundamentally in this busi- 
ness. The hypothesis which ascribes Paganism wholly or 
mostly to this agency, I call a little more respectable ; but 
I cannot yet call it the true hypothesis. Think, would we 
believe, and take with us as our life-guidance, an allegory, 
a poetic sport ? Not sport but earnest is what we should 
require. It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world ; 
to die is not sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport to 
him ; it was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be 
alive ! 

I find, therefore, that though these Allegory theorists are 
on the way towards truth in this matter, they have not reached 



: 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. ' 7 

it either. Pagan Religion is indeed an Allegory, a Symbol 
of what men felt and knew about the Universe ; and all Re 
ligions are symbols of that, altering always as that alters ; 
but it seems to me a radical perversion, and even //^version, 
of the business, to put that forward as the origin and moving 
cause, when it was rather the result and termination. To 
get beautiful allegories, a perfect poetic symbol, was not the 
want of men ; but to know what they were ^o believe about 
this Universe, what course they were to steer in it ; what, in 
this mysterious Life of theirs, they had to hope and to fear, 
to do and to forbear doing. The Pilgrini's Progress is an 
Allegory, and a beautiful, just and serious one : but consider 
whether Bunyan's Allegory could have preceded the Faith 
it symbolizes ! The Faith had to be already there, standing 
believed by everybody ; — of which the Allegory could thejt 
become a shadow ; and, with all its seriousness, we may say 
a sportful shadow, a mere play of the Fancy, m comparison 
with that awful Fact and scientific certainty which it poeti- 
cally strives to emblem. The Allegory is the product of the 
certainty, not the producer of it ; not in Bunyan's nor in any 
other case. For Paganism, therefore, we have still to in- 
quire. Whence came that scientific certainty, the parent of 
such a bewildered heap of allegories, errors and confusions ? 
How was it, what was it ? 

Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend " explaining," 
in this place, or in any place, such a phenomenon as that 
far-distant distracted cloudy imbroglio of Paganism, — more 
like a cloudfield than a distant continent of firm land and 
facts ! It is no longer a reality, yet it was one. We ought 
to understand that this seeming cloudfield was once a reality; 
that not poetic allegory, least of all that dupery and decep- 
tion, was the origin of it. Men, I say, never did believe idle 
songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories : men in al] 



8 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

times, especially in early earnest times., have had an instinct 
for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks. Let us try if, 
leaving out both the quack theory and the allegory one, and 
listening with affectionate attention to that far-off confused 
rumor of the Pagan ages, we cannot ascertain so much as 
this at least. That there was a kind of fact at the heart of 
them ; that they too were not mendacious and distracted, 
but in their own poor way true and sane ! 

You remember that fancy of Plato's, of a man who had 
grown to maturity in some dark distance, and was brought 
on a sudden into the upper air to see the sun rise. What 
would his wonder be, his rapt astonishment, at the sight we 
daily witness with indifference ! With the free open sense 
of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heart 
would be kindled by that sight, he would discern it well to 
be Godlike, his soul would fall down in worship before it. 
Now, just such a childlike greatness was in the primitive 
nations. The first Pagan Thinker among rude men, the first 
man that began to think, was precisely this child-man of 
Plato's. Simple, open as a child, yet with the depth and 
strength of a man. Nature had as yet no name to him ; he 
had not yet united under a name the infinite variety of sights, 
sounds, shapes and motions, which we now collectively name 
Universe, Nature, or the like, — and so with a name dismiss 
it from us. To the wild deep-hearted man all was yet new, 
not veiled under names or formulas ; it stood naked, flashing 
in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was 
to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, 
/r^/^rnatural. This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, 
the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas ; — that great 
deep sea of azure that swims overhead ; the winds sweeping 
through it ; the black cloud fashioning itseif together, now 



■J^'^ 




THE TREES, THE MOUNTAINS, RIVERS."— PaO(' S. 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 9 

pouring out fire, now hail and rain ; what is it ? Ay, what ? 
At bottom we do not yet know ; we can never know at all. It 
is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty ; 
it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our want of 
insight. It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it. 
Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, 
is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words. We call 
that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture 
learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and 
silk : but what is it ? What made it ? Whence comes it t 
Whither goes it .'^ Science has done much for us ; but it is 
a poor science that would hide from us the great deep 
sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never pene- 
trate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. 
This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a 
miracle ; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to who- 
soever will think of it. 

That great mystery of Time, were there no other; the 
illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, 
rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on 
which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like 
apparitions which are^ and then are not : this is forever very 
literally a miracle ; a thing to strike us dumb, — for we have 
no word to speak about it. This universe, ah me — what 
could the wild man know of it ; what can we yet know ? 
That it is a Force, and thousand-fold Complexity of Forces ; 
a Force which is not we. That is all ; it is not we, it is alto- 
gether different from ms. Force, Force, everywhere Force ; 
we ourselves a mysterious Force in the centre of that. 
" There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force 
in it : how else could it rot ? " Nay surely, to the Atheistic 
Thinker, if such a one were possible, it must be a miracle 
too, this huge inimitable whirlwind of Force, which envel- 



10 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

ons us here ; never-resting whirlwind, high as .ensityj 

old as Eternity. What is it ? God's creation, the rehgioiis 
people answer ; it is the Almighty God's ! Atheistic science 
babbles po'^^'K^ -^ .vitli scientific nomenclatures, experi- 
ments and .cvL-not, as if it were a poor dead thing, to be 
bottled up in Leyden jars and sold over counters : but the 
natural sense of man, in all times, if he will honestly apply 
his sense, proclaims it to be a living thing, — ah, an unspeak- 
able, godlike thing ; towards which the best attitude for us, 
after never so much science, is awe, devout prostration and 
humility of soul; worship if not in words, then in silence. 

But now I remark farther : What in such a time as ours 
it requires a I^ophet or Poet to teach us, namely, the strip- 
ping-off of those poor undevout wrappages, nomenclatures 
and scientific hearsays, — this, the ancient earnest soul, as 
"yet unincumbered with these things, did for itself. The 
world, which is now divine only to the gifted, was then 
divine to whosoever would turn his eye upon it. He stood 
bare before it, face to face. " All was Godlike or God : " — 
Jean Paul still finds it so; the giant Jean Paul, who has 
power to escape out of hearsays : but there then were no 
hearsays. Canopus shining down over the desert, with its 
blue diamond brightness (that wild blue spirit-like brightness, 
far brighter than we ever witness here), would pierce into the 
heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it was guiding 
through the solitary waste there. To his wild heart, with 
all feelings in it, with no speech for any feeling, it might 
seem a little eye, that Canopus, glancing out on him from 
the great deep Eternity ; revealing the inner Splendor to 
him. Cannot we understand how these men worshipped 
Canopus ; became what we call Sabeans, worshipping the 
stars ? Such is to me the secret of all forms of Paganism, 
Worship is transcendent wonder ; wonder for which there is 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. II 

now r.?.'',viit or measure; that is worship. To these pri^ 
meval men, all things and every thing they saw exist besrae 
them were an emblem of the Godlike, of some God. 

And look what perennial fibre of truth was in that. To 
us also, through every star, through every blade^^'^f grass, is 
not a God made visible, if we will open our minds and eyes? 
We do not worship in that way now: but is it not reckoned 
still a merit, proof of what we call a "poetic nature," that 
we recognize how every object has a divine beauty in it ; how 
every object still verily is " a window through which we may 
look into Infinitude itself"? He that can discern the loveli- 
ness of things, we call him Poet, Painter, Man of Genius, 
gifted, lovable. These poor Sabeans did even what he does, 
— in their own fashion. That they did it, in what fashion 
soever, was a merit: better than what the entirely stupid 
man did, what the horse and camel did, — namely, nothing! 

But now if all things whatsoever that we look upon are 
emblems to us of the Highest God, I add that more so than 
any of them is man such an emblem. You have heard of 
St. Chrysostom's celebrated saying in reference to the 
Shekinah, or Ark of Testimony, visible Revelation of God, 
among the Hebrews : " The true Shekinah is Man ! " Yes, 
it is even so : this is no vain phrase ; it is veritably so. 
The essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself 
"I," — ah, what words have we for such things? — is a 
breath of Heaven; the Highest Being reveals himself in 
man. This body, these faculties, this life of ours, is it not all 
as a vesture for that Unnamed ? " There is but one Tem- 
ple in the Universe," says the devout Novalis, " and that is 
the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than that high form. 
Bendinor before men is a reverence done to this Revelation 
in the Flesh. We touch Heaven when we lay our hand on 
a human body ! " This sounds much like a mere flourish of 



12 LECTURES OAT HEROES. 

rhetoric ; but it is not so. If well meditated, it will turn 
out to be a scientific fact; the expression, in such words as 
can be had, of the actual truth of the thing. We are the 
miracle of miracles, — the great inscrutable mystery of God. 
We cannot understand it, we know not how to speak of it ; 
but we may feel and know, if we like, that it is verily so. 

Well ; these truths were once more readily felt than now. 
The young generations of the world, who had in them 
the freshness of young children, and yet the depth of ear- 
nest men, who did not think that they had finished off all 
things in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them scien- 
tific names, but had to gaze direct at them there, with awe 
and wonder : they felt better what of divinity is in man and 
Nature; — they, without being mad, could worship Nature, 
and man more than any thing else in Nature. Worship, 
that is, as I said above, admire without limit : this, in the 
full use of their faculties, with all sincerity of heart, they 
could do. I consider Hero-worship to be the grand modify- 
ing element in that ancient system of thought. What I 
called the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may 
say, out of many roots : every adm.iration, adoration of a 
star or natural object, was a root or fibre of a root ; but 
Hero-worship is the deepest root of all ; the tap-root, from 
which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and 
grown. 

And now if worship even of a star had some meaning in 
it, how much more might that of a Hero ! Worship of a 
Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say 
great men are still admirable ; I say there is, at bottom, 
nothing else admirable ! No nobler feeling than this of 
admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast 
of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying 
influence in man's life. Religion I find stand upon it ; not 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 1 3 

Paganism only, but far higher and truer religions, — all 
religion hitherto known. Hero-worship, heartfelt prostrate 
admiration, submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest 
godlike Form of Man, — is not that the germ of Christian- 
ity itself ? The greatest of all Heroes is One — whom we 
do not name here ! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred 
matter ; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a princi- 
ple extant throughout man's whole history on earth. 

Or coming into lower, less ?///speakable provinces, is not 
all Loyalty akin to religious Faith also ? Faith is loyalty to 
some inspired Teacher, some spiritual Hero. And what 
therefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all society, but 
an effluence of Hero worship, submissive admiration for the 
truly great 1 Society is founded on Hero-worship. All dig- 
nities of rank, on which human association rests, are what 
we may call a Hero2iYchy (Government of Heroes), — or a 
Hierarchy, for it is " sacred '' enough withal ! The Duke 
means Dux, Leader ; King is Kon-ning, Kan-ning, Man 
that knows or cans. Society everywhere is some represen- 
tation, not /^supportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship 
of Heroes ; — reverence and obedience done to men really 
great and wise. Not /;2supportably inaccurate, I say ! They 
are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, all represent- 
ing gold; — and several of them, alas, always areyi?/^^^ notes. 
We can do with some forged false notes; with a good many 
even ; but not with all, or the most of them, forged ! No : 
there have to come revolutions then ; cries of Democracy, 
Liberty and Equahty, and I know not what : — the notes being 
all false, and no gold to be had for them, people take to cry- 
ing in their despair that there is no gold, that there never 
was any ! — " Gold," Hero-worship, is nevertheless, as it 
was always and everywhere, and cannot cease till man him- 
self ceases. 



14 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

I am well aware that in these days Hero-worship, the 
thing I call Hero-worship, professes to have gone out, and 
finally ceased. This, for reasons which it will be worth 
while some time to inquire into, is an age that as it were 
denies the existence of great men ; denies the desirableness 
of great men. Show our critics a great man, a Luther for 
example, they begin to what they call "account" for him; 
not to worship him-, but take the dimensions of him, — and 
bring him out to be a little kind of man ! He was the " crea- 
ture of the Time," they say; the Time called him forth, the 
Time did everything, he nothing — but what we the little 
critic could have done too ! This seems to me but melan- 
choly work. The Time call forth ? Alas, we have known 
Times ^^// loudly enough for their great man; but not find 
him when they called ! He was not there ; Providence had 
not sent him ; the Time, callmg its loudest, had to go down 
to confusion and wreck because he would not come when 
called. 

For if we will think of it, no Time need have gone to ruin, 
could it have found a man great enough, a man wise and 
good enough : wisdom to discern truly what the Time 
wanted, valor to lead it on the right road thither; these are 
the salvation of any Time. But I liken common languid 
Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their 
languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, 
impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards 
final ruin ; — all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the 
lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, 
with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the light- 
ning. His word is the wise healing word which all can 
believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once 
struck on it, into fire like his own. The dry mouldering 
sticks are thought to have called him forth. They did want 




I 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 1 5 

him greatly; but as to calling him forth — ! — Those are 
critics of small vision, I think, who cry : " See, is it not the 
sticks that made the fire ? " No sadder proof can be given 
by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. 
There is no sadder symptom of a generation than such gen- 
eral blindness to the spiritual lightning, with faith only in the 
heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last consummation of 
unbelief. In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find 
the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his 
epoch ; — the lightning, without which the fuel never would 
have burnt. The History of the World, I said already, was 
the Biography of Great Men. 

Such small critics do what they can to promote unbelief 
and universal spiritual paralysis : but happily they cannot 
always completely succeed. In all times it is possible for a 
man to arise great enough to feel that they and their doctrines 
are chimeras and cobwebs. And what is notable, in no time 
whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living men's hearts 
a certain altogether peculiar reverence for Great Men ; genu- 
ine admiration, loyalty, adoration, however dim and perverted 
it may be. Hero-worship endures forever while man endures. 
Boswell venerates his Johnson, right truly even in the Eigh- 
teenth century. The unbelieving French believe in their 
Voltaire; and burst out round him into very curious Hero- 
worship, in that last act of his life when they " stifle him under 
roses." It has always seemed to me extremely curious, this 
of Voltaire. Truly, if Christianity be the highest instance 
of Hero-worship, then we may find here in Voltaireism one of 
the lowest ! He whose life was that of a kind of Antichrist, 
does again on this side exhibit a curious contrast. No 
people ever were so little prone to admire at all as those 
French of Voltaire^' Persiflage was the character of their 
whole riind ; adoration had nowhere a place in it. Yet see ! 



1 6 LECTURES ON HEROES. -i 

\ 

The old man of Ferney comes up to Paris ; an old, tottering, 
infirm man of eighty-four years. They feel that he too is a 
kind of Hero ; that he has spent his life in opposing error 
and injustice, delivering Calases, unmasking hypocrites in 
high places ; — in short that he too, though in a strange way, 
has fought like a valiant man. They feel withal that, if per- 
siflage be the great thing, there never was such 2^ persiflcur. 
He is the reajized ideal of every one of them ; the thing they 
are all wanting to be; of all Frenchmen the most French. 
He is properly their god, — such god as they are fit for. 
Accordingly all persons, from the Queen Antoinette to the 
Douanier at the Porte St. Denis, do they not worship him ? 
People of quality disguise themselves as tavern-waiters. The 
Maitre de Poste, with a broad oath, orders his Postilion, 
" Va bon train; thou art driving M. de Voltaire." At Paris 
his carriage is "the nucleus of a comet, whose train fills 
whole streets." The ladies pluck a hair or two from his fur, 
to keep it as a sacred relic. There was nothing highest, beau- 
tifulest, noblest, in all France, that did not feel this man to be 
higher, beautifuler, nobler. I 

Yes, from Norse Odin to English Samuel Johnson, from ■ 
the divine Founder of Christianity to the withered Pontiff of 
Encyclopedism, in all times and places, the Hero has been I 
worshipped. It will ever be so. We all love great men ; 
love, venerate and bow down submissive before great men : ,, 
nay, can we honestly bow down to any thing else ? Ah, does | 
not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by 
doing reverence to what is really above him ? No nobler or 
more blessed feeling dwells in man's heart. And to me it 
is very cheering to consider that no sceptical logic, or general 
triviality, insincerity and aridity of any Time and its influ- 
ences can destroy this noble inborn loyalty and worship that 
j§ in man. In times of unbelief;, which soon have to become 






THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 1 7 

times of revolution, much down-rushing, sorrowful decay and 
ruin is visible to everybody. For myself in these days, I 
seem to see in this indestructibility of Hero-worship the 
everlasting adamant lower than which the confused wreck 
of revolutionary things cannot fall. The confused wreck of 
things crumbling, and even crashing and tumbling all around 
us, in these revolutionary ages, will get down so far ; no 
farther. It is an eternal corner-stone, from which they can 
begin to build themselves up again. That man, in some 
sense or other, worships Heroes; that we all of us rever- 
ence and must ever reverence Great Men : this is, to me, 
the living rock amid all rushings-down whatsoever ; — the 
one fixed point in modern revolutionary history, otherwise 
as if bottomless and shoreless. 

So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, 
but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old 
nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the work- 
ings of God ; the Hero is still worshipable : this, under poor 
cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have 
struggled, as they could, to set forth. I think Scandinavian 
Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It 
is, for one thing, the latest ; it continued in these regions of 
Europe till the eleventh century : eight hundred years ago 
the Norwegians were still worshippers of Odin. It is inter- 
esting also as the creed of our fathers ; the men whose 
blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still re- 
semble in so many ways. Strange : they did believe that, 
while we believe so differently. Let us look a little more at 
this poor Norse creed, for many reasons. We have toler- 
able means to do it ; for there is another point of interest 
in these Scandinavian mythologies : that they have been 
preserved so well. 



1 8 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

In that strange island Iceland, — burst up, the geologists 
say, by fire from the bottom of the sea ; a wild land of bar- 
renness and lava ; swallowed many months of every year in 
black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in summer- 
time ; towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean ; 
with its snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid 
volcanic chasms, like the waste chaotic battle-field of Frost 
and Fire ; — where of all places we least looked for Litera- 
ture or written memorials, the record of these things was 
written down. On the seaboard of this wild land is a rim 
of grassy country where cattle can subsist, and men by 
means of them and of what the sea yields ; and it seems 
they were poetic men these, men who had deep thoughts in 
them, and uttered musically their thoughts. Much would be 
lost, had Iceland not been burst up from the sea, not been 
discovered by the Northmen ! The old Norse Poets were 
many of them natives of Iceland. 

Sccmund, one of the early Christian Priests there, who 
perhaps had a lingering fondness for Paganism, collected 
certain of their old Pagan songs, just about becoming obsolete 
then, — Poems or Chants of a mythic, prophetic, mostly all 
of a religious character : that is what Norse critics call the 
Elder or Poetic Edda. Edda, 2l word of uncertain etymol- 
ogy, is thought to signify Aficestress. Snorro Sturleson, an 
Iceland gentleman, an extremely notable personage, educated 
by this Saemund's grandson, took in hand next, near a century 
afterwards, to put together, among several other books he 
wrote, a kind of Prose Synopsis of the whole Mythology; 
elucidated by new fragments of traditionary verse. A work 
constructed really with great ingenuity, native talent, what one 
might call unconscious art ; altogether a perspicuous clear 
work, pleasant reading still: this is the Vouriger-or Prose 
Edda. By these and the numeruos other Sao^as, mostly 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 1 9 

Icelandic; with the commentaries, Icelandic or not, which go 
on zealously in the North to this day, it is possible to gain 
some direct insight even yet ; and see that old Norse system 
of Behef, as it were, face to face. Let us forget that it is 
erroneous Religion ; let us look at it as old Thought, and try 
if we cannot sympathize with it somewhat. 

The primary characteristic of this old Northland Myth- 
ology I find to be Impersonation of the visible workings 
of Nature. Earnest simple recognition of the workings of 
Physical Nature, as a thing wholly miraculous, stupendous 
and divine. What we now lecture of as Science, they 
wondered at, and fell down in awe before, as Religion. The 
dark hostile Powers of Nature they figure to themselves as 
" Jottins" Giants, huge shaggy beings of a demonic char- 
acter. Frost, Fire, Sea-tempest ; these are Jotuns. The 
friendly Powers again, as Summer-heat, the Sun, are Gods. 
The empire of this Universe is divided between these two ; 
they dwell apart, in perennial internecine feud. The Gods 
dwell above in Asgard, the Garden of the Asen, or Divini- 
ties ; Jotunheim, a distant dark chaotic land, is the home of 
the Jotuns. 

Curious all this ; and not idle or inane, if we will look at 
the foundation of it ! The power of Fii'e, or Flame, for in 
stance, which we designate by some trivial chemical name, 
thereby hiding from ourselves the essential character of won- 
der that dwells in it as in all things, is with these old North- 
men, Loke, a most swift subtle Demon, of the brood of the 
Jotuns. The savages of the Ladrones Islands too (say some 
Spanish voyagers) thought Fire, which they never had seen 
before, was a devil or god, that bit you sharply when you 
touched it, and that lived upon dry wood. From us too no 
Chemistry, if it had not Stupidity to help it, would hide that 
Flame is a wonder. What is Flame ? — Frost the old Norse 



20 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Seer discerns to be a monstrous hoary Jotun, the Giant 
Thrym, Hr.ym j or Riiite, the old word now nearly obsolete 
here, but still used in Scotland to signify hoar-frost. Rime 
was not then as now a dead chemical thing, but a living 
Jotun or Devil; the monstrous Jotun Rime drove home his 
Horses at night, sat " combing their manes," — which Horses 
were Hail-Clouds^ or fleet Frost-Winds. His Cows — No, 
not his, but a kinsman's, the Giant Hymir's Cows are Ice- 
bergs : this Hymir "looks at the rocks " with his devil-eye, 
and they split in the glance of it. 

Thunder was not then mere Electricity, vitreous or resi- 
nous ; it was the God Donner (Thunder) or Thor, — God also 
of beneficent Summer-heat. The thunder was his wrath ; 
the gathering of the black clouds is the drawing-down of 
Thor's angry brows ; the fire-bolt bursting out of Heaven is 
the all-rending Hammer flung from the hand of Thor : he 
urges his loud chariot over the mountain-tops, — that is the 
peal ; wrathful he " blows in his red beard," — that is the 
rustling stormblast before the thunder begin. Balder again, 
the White God, the beautiful, the just and benignant (whom 
the early Christian Missionaries found to resemble Christ), 
is the Sun, — beautifulest of visible things; wondrous too, 
and divine still, after all our Astronomies and Almanacs ! 
But perhaps the notablest god we hear tell of is one of whom 
Grimm the German Etymologist finds trace : the God Wilnsch, 
or Wish. The God Wish; who could give us all that we 
wished / Is not this the sincerest and yet rudest voice of 
the spirit of man ? The 7'udest ideal that man ever formed ; 
which still shows itself in the latest forms of our spiritual 
culture. Higher considerations have to teach us that the 
God Wish is not the true God. 

Of the other Gods or Jotuns I will mention only for 
etymology's sake, that Sea-tempest is the Jotun Aegir, a very 



1 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 21 

dangerous Jotim; — and now to this day, on our River Trent, 
as I learn, the Nottingham bargemen, when the River is in 
a certain flooded state (a kind of backwater, or eddying swirl 
it has, very dangerous to them), call it Eager j they cry out, 
" Have a care, there is the Eager coming ! " Curious ; that 
word surviving, like the peak of a submerged world ! The 
oldest Nottingham bargemen had believed in the God Aegir. 
Indeed our English blood too in good part is Danish, Norse ; 
or rather, at bottom, Danish and Norse and Saxon have no 
distinction, except a superficial one, — as of Heathen and 
Christian, or the like. But all over our Island we are 
mingled largely with Danes proper, — from the incessant 
invasions there were : and this, of course, in a greater propor- 
tion along the east coast ; and greatest of all, as I find, in 
the North Country. From the Humber upwards, all over 
Scotland, the Speech of the common people is still in a 
singular degree Icelandic; its Germanism has still a peculiar 
Norse tinge. They too are "Normans," Northmen, — if 
that be any great beauty ! — 

Of the chief god, Odin, we shall speak by and by. Mark 
at present so much ; what the essence of Scandinavian and 
indeed of all Paganism is : a recognition of the forces of 
Nature as godlike, stupendous, personal Agencies, — as 
Gods and Demons. Not inconceivable to us. It is the 
infant Thought of man opening itself, with awe and wonder, 
on this ever-stupendous Universe. To me there is in the 
Norse System something very genuine, very great and man- 
like. A broad simplicity, rusticity, so very different from 
the light gracefulness of the old Greek Paganism, distin- 
guishes this Scandinavian System. It is Thought; the 
genuine Thought of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly opened 
to the things about them ; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart 
inspection of the things, — the first characteristic of all good 



22 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as. 
in the Greek Paganism ; a certain homely truthfulness and 
rustic strength, a great rude sincerity, discloses itself here. 
It is strange, after our beautiful Apollo statues and clear 
smiling mythuses, to come down upon the Norse Gods 
"brewing ale " to hold their feast with Aegir, the Sea-Jotun; 
sending out Thor to get the caldron for them in the Jotun 
country ; Thor, after many adventures, clapping the Pot on 
his head, like a huge hat, and walking off with it, — quite 
lost in it, the ears of the Pot reaching down to his heels ! 
A kind of vacant hugeness, large awkward gianthood, 
characterizes that Norse System ; enormous force, as yet 
altogether untutored, stalking helpless with large uncertain 
strides. Consider only their primary mythus of the Creation. 
The Gods, having got the Giant Ymer slain, a Giant made 
by " warm wind," and much confused work, out of the conflict 
of Frost and Fire, — determined on constructing a world 
with him. His blood made the Sea ; his flesh was the Land, 
the Rocks his bones ; of his eyebrows they formed Asgard 
their Gods' dwelling ; his skull was the great blue vault of 
Immensity, and the brains of it became the Clouds. What 
a Hyper-Brobdignagian business ! Untamed Thought, 
great, giantlike, enormous ; — to be tamed in due time into 
the compact greatness, not gianthke, but godlike and 
stronger than gianthood, of the Shakspeares, the Goethes J 
— Spiritually as well as bodily these men are our progeni- 
tors. 

I hke, too, that representation they have of the Tree Ig- 
drasil. All Life is figured by them as a Tree. Igdrasil, the 
Ash-tree of Existence, has its roots deep-down in the king- 
doms of Hela or Death ; its trunk reaches up heaven-high, 
spreads its boughs over the whole Universe : it is the Tree 
of Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death-kingdom, sit : 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 2^ 

Three Nomas, Fates, — the Past, Present, Future ; water- 
ing its roots from the Sacred Well. Its "boughs," with 
their buddings and disleafings, — events, things suffered, 
things done, catastrophes, — stretch through all lands and 
times. Is not every leaf of it a biography, every fibre there 
an act or word? Its boughs are Histories of Nations. 
The rustle of it is the noise of Human Existence, onwards 
from of old. It grows there, the breath of Human Passion 
rustling through it; — or stormtost, the stormwind howling 
through it like the voice of all the gods. It is Igdrasil, the 
Tree of Existence. It is the past, the present, and the 
future ; what was done, what is doing, what will be done ; 
" the infinite conjugation of the verb To do.''"' Considering 
how human things circulate, each inextricably in communion 
with all, — how the word I speak to you to-day is borrowed, 
not from Ulfila the Moesogoth only, but from all men since 
the first man began to speak, — I find no similitude so true 
as this of a Tree. Beautiful ; altogether beautiful and great. 
The " Machine of the Universe," — alas, do but think of 
that in contrast ! 

Well, it is strange enough, this old Norse view of Nature; 
different enough from what we believe of Nature. Whence 
it specially came, one would not like to be compelled to say 
very minutely ! One thing we may say : It came from the 
thoughts of Norse men ; — from the thought, above all, of 
^^ first Norse man who had an original power of thinking. 
The First Norse " man of genius," as we should call him ! 
Innumerable men had passed by, across this Universe, with 
a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel ; 
or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men 
only feel; — till the great Thinker came, the original man, 
the Seer ; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slum- 



24 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

bering capability of all into Thought. It is ever the way 
with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all 
men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The 
Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, 
round his Thought ; answering to it. Yes, even so ! Joyful 
to men as the dawning of day from night ; — is it not, 
indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, 
from death into life ? We still honor such a man : call 
him Poet, Genius, and so forth : but to these wild men he 
was a very magician, a worker of miraculous unexpected 
blessing for them ; a Prophet, a God ! — Thought once 
awakened does not again slumber ; unfolds itself into a 
System of Thought ; grows, in man after man, generation 
after generation, — till its full stature is reached, and stich 
System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place 
to another. 

For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and 
Chief Norse God, we fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, 
and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero, of worth /;;zmeasur- 
able ; admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds, 
became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate 
Thinking ; and many other powers, as yet miraculous ? So, 
with boundless gratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. 
Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of this Uni- 
verse ; given assurance to them of their own destiny there ? 
By him they know now what they have to do here, what to 
look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melo- 
dious, by him ; he first has made Life alive ! — We may call 
this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology : Odin, or what- 
ever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man 
among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated, 
a hke view starts into being in all minds ; grows, keeps 
ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all 



THE HERO AS DIVEVITY. 25 

minds it lay written, but invisil^ly, as in sympathetic ink ; at 
his word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch 
of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not 
the arrival of a Thinker in the world ! — 

One other thing we must not forget ; it will explain, a 
little, the confusion of these Norse Eddas. They are not 
one coherent System of Thought ; but properly the summa- 
tion of several successive systems. All this of the old 
Norse Belief which is flung out for us, in one level of dis- 
tance in the Edda, like a picture painted on the same canvas, 
does not at all stand so in the reahty. It stands rather, at 
all manner of distances and depths, of successive generations 
since the Belief first began. All Scandinavian thinkers, 
since the first of them, contributed to that Scandinavian 
System of Thought ; in ever-new elaboration and addition, 
it is the combined work of them all. What history it had, 
how it changed from shape to. shape, by one thinker's con- 
tribution after another, till it got to the full final shape we 
see it under in the Edda, no man will now ever know : its 
Councils of Trebisond, Councils of Trent, Athanasiuses, 
Dantes, Luthers, are sunk without echo in the dark night ! 
Only that it had such a history we can all know. Whereso- 
ever a thinker appeared, there in the thing he thought of 
was a contribution, accession, a change or revolution made. 
Alas, the grandest " revolution " of all, the one made by the 
man Odin himself, is not this too sunk for us like the rest ! 
Of Odin what history ? Strange rather to reflect that he 
had a history ! That this Odin, in his wild Norse vesture, 
with his wild beard and eyes, his rude Norse speech and 
ways, was a man like us ; with our sorrows, joys, with our 
limbs, features; — intrinsically all one as we: and did such 
a work ! But the work, much of it, has perished ; the 
worker, all to the name. " Wednesdi-dcj,^'' men will say to- 



26 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

morrow ; Odin's day ! Of Odin there exists no history : no 
document of it ; no guess about it worth repeating. 

Snorro indeed, in the quietest manner, ahnost in a brief 
business style, writes down, in his Heimskringla, how Odin 
was a heroic Prince, in the Black-Sea region, with Twelve 
Peers, and a great people straitened for room. How he led 
these Aseji (Asiatics) of his out of Asia; settled them in the 
North parts of Europe, by warlike conquest ; invented Letters, 
Poetry and so forth, — and came by and by to be worshipped 
as Chief God by these Scandinavians, his Twelve Peers made 
into Twelve Sons of his own, Gods hke himself : Snorro has 
no doubt of this. Saxo Grammaticus, a very curious North- 
man of that same century, is still more unhesitating ; scruples 
not to find out a historical fact in every individual mythus, 
and writes it down as a terrestrial event in Denmark or else- 
where. Torfaeus, learned and cautious, some centuries later, 
assigns by calculation a date for it : Odin, he says, came into 
Europe about the Year 70 before Christ. Of all which, as 
grounded on mere uncertainties, found to be untenable now, 
I need say nothing. Far, very far beyond the Year 70 ! 
Odin's date, adventures, whole terrestrial history, figure and 
environment are sunk from us forever into unknown thou- 
sands of years. 

Nay Grimm, the German Antiquary, goes so far as to deny 
that any man Odin ever existed. He proves it by etymology. 
The word Wuotan^ which is the original form of Odin., a word 
spread, as name of their chief Divinity, over all the Teutonic 
Nations everywhere ; this word, which connects itself, accord- 
ing to Grimm, with the Latin vadere, with the English wade 
and suchlike, — means primarily Movement, Source of Move- 
ment, Power ; and is the fit name of the highest god, not of 
any man. The word signifies Divinity, he says, among the 
old Saxon, German and all Teutonic Nations ; the adjectives 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 27 

formed from it all signify divine^ supreme., or something per- 
taining to the chief god. Like enough ! We must bow to 
Grimm in matters etymological. Let us consider it fixed 
that Wuotan means Wading., force of Movement. And now 
still, what hinders it from being the name of a Heroic Man 
and Mover., as well as of a god ? As for the adjectives, and 
words formed from it, — did not the Spaniards in their uni- 
versal admiration for Lope, get into the habit of saying "a 
Lope flower," " a Lope dama^^'' if the flower or woman were 
of surpassing beauty ? Had this lasted, Lope would have 
grown, in Spain, -to be an adjective signifying ^^(^f^///^^ also. 
Indeed, Adam Smith, in his Essay on Language.^ surmises 
that all adjectives whatsoever were formed precisely in that 
way: some very green thing, chiefly notable for its greenness, 
got the appellative name Green., and then the next thing re- 
markable for that quality, a tree for instance, was named the 
greeji tree, — as we still say " the sfeam coach," " four-horse 
coach," or the like. All primary adjectives, according to 
Smith, were formed in this way ; were at first substantives 
and things. We cannot annihilate a man for etymologies 
like that ! Surely there was a First Teacher and Captain ; 
surely there must have been an Odin, palpable to the sense 
at one time ; no adjective, but a real Hero of flesh and blood ! 
The voice of all tradition, history or echo of history, agrees 
with all that thought will teach one about it, to assure us of 
this. 

How the man Odin came to be considered a god, the chief 
god ? — that surely is a question which nobody would wish to 
dogmatize upon. I have said, his people knew no limits to 
their admiration of him ; they had as yet no scale to measure 
admiration by. Fancy your own generous heart's-love of 
some greatest man expanding till it trajiscended all bounds, 
till it filled and overflowed the whole field of your thought ! 



:c: 



'ES 



:ROi 



Or what if this man Odin, — since a great deep soul, with the 
afflatus and mysterious tide of vision and impulse rushing on 
him he knows not whence, is ever an enigma, a kind of terror 
and wonder to himself, — should have felt that perhaps he 
was divine ; that he was some effluence of the " Wuotan," 
" Movement,''' Supreme Power and Divinity, of whom to his 
rapt' vision all Nature was the awful Flame-image ; that some 
effluence of Wtiotan dwelt here in him ! He was not neces- ; 
sarily false ; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest he 
knew. A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is, 
— alternates between the highest heis^ht and the lowest 
depth; can, of all things, the least measure — Himself! 
What others take him for, and what he guesses that he may 
be ; these two items strangely act on one another, help to de- 
termine one another. With all men reverently admiring him ; 
with his own wild soul full of noble ardors and affections, of 
whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new light ; a divine 
Universe bursting all into godhke beauty round him, and no 
man to whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think 
himself to be ? " Wuotan ? " All men^ answered, " Wuo- 
tan!" — 

And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases ; 
how if a man was great while hving, he becomes tenfold 



greater when dead. 



What an enormous cmnera-obscura mag- 



nifier is Tradition ! How a thing grows in the human Mem- 
ory, in the human Imagination, w^hen love, worship and all 
that lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And 
in the darkness, in the entire ignorance ; without date or doc- 
ument, no book, no Arundel-marble ; only here and there 
some dumb monumental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty years, 
were there no books, any great man would grow mythic, the 
contemporaries who had seen him, being once all dead. And 
in three hundred years, and in three thousand years — ! — To 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 29 

attempt theorizing on such matters would profit little : they 
are matters which refuse to be theoremed and diagramed ; 
which Logic ought to know that she catt?iot speak of. Enough 
for us to discern, far in the uttermost distance, some gleam 
as of a small real light shining in the centre of that enormous 
camera-obscura image ; to discern that the centre of it all 
was not a madness and nothing, but a sanity and something. 
This light, kindled in the great dark vortex of the Norse 
mind, dark but living, waiting only for light ; this is to me 
the centre of the whole. How such light will then shine out, 
and with wondrous thousand-fold expansion spread itself, in 
lorms and colors, depends not on it, so much as on the National 
Mind recipient of it. The colors and forms of your light 
will be those of the cut-glass it has to shine through. — Curi- 
ous to think how, for every man, any the truest fact is modelled 
by the nature of the man ! I said, The earnest man, speak- 
ing to his brother men, must always have stated what seemed 
to him 2ifact, a real Appearance of Nature. But the way in 
which such Appearance or fact shaped itself, — what sort of 
fact it became for him, — was and is modified by his own 
laws of thinking; deep, subtle, but universal, ever-operating 
laws. The world of Nature, for every man, is the Fantasy 
of Himself; this world is the multiplex "Image of his own 
Dream." Who knows to what unnamable subtleties of spir- 
itual law all these Pagan Fables owe their shape ! The num- 
ber Twelve, divisiblest of all, which could be halved, quar- 
tered, parted into three, into six, the most remarkable number, 
— this was enough to determine the Signs of the Zodiac, the 
number of Odin's Sons, and innumerable other Twelves. 
Any vague rumor of number had a tendency to settle itself 
into Twelve. So with regard to every other matter. And 
quite unconsciously too, — with no notion of building up 
" Allegories " ! But the fresh clear glance of those First 



30 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Ages would be prompt in discerning the secret relations of 
things, and wholly open to obey these. Schiller finds in the 
Cesius of Venus an everlasting aesthetic truth as to the nature 
of all Beauty ; curious: — but he is careful not to insinuate 
that the old Greek Mythists had any notion of lecturing about 

the " Philosophy of Criticism " ! On the whole, we must 

leave those boundless regions. Cannot we conceive that 
Odin was a reality ? Error indeed, error enough : but sheer 
falsehood, idle fables, allegory aforethought, — we will not 
believe that our Fathers believed in these. 

Odin's Runes are a significant feature of him. Runes, 
and the miracles of " magic " he worked by them, make a 
great feature in tradition. Runes are the Scandinavian 
Alphabet ; suppose Odin to have been the inventor of Let- 
ters, as well as " magic," among that people ! It is the 
greatest invention man has ever made, this of marking 
down the unseen thought that is in him by written charac- 
ters. It is a kind of second speech, almost as miraculous 
as the first. You remember the astonishment and incredulity 
of Atahualpa the Peruvian King ; how he made the Spanish 
Soldier who was guarding him scratch Dios on his thumb 
nail, that he might try the next soldier with it, to ascertain 
whether such a miracle was possible. If Odin brought 
Letters among his people, he might work magic enough'. 

Writing by Runes has some air of being original among 
the Norsemen : not a Phoenician Alphabet, but a native 
Scandinavian one. Snorro tells us farther that Odin in- 
vented Poetry ; the music of human speech, as well as that 
miraculous runic marking of it. Transport yourselves into 
the early childhood of nations ; the first beautiful morning- 
light of our Europe, when all yet lay in fresh young radiance 
as of a great sunrise, and our Europe was first beginning to 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 3 1 

think, to be ! Wonder, hope ; infinite radiance of hope and 
wonder, as of a young child's thoughts, in the hearts of 
these strong men ! Strong sons of Nature ; and here was 
not only a wild Captain and Fighter ; discerning with his 
wild flashing eyes what to do, with his wild lion-heart dar- 
ing and doing it ; but a Poet too, all that we mean by a Poet, 
Prophet, great devout Thinker and Inventor, — as the truly 
Great Man ever is. A Hero is a Hero at all points ; in the 
soul and thought of him first of all. This Odin, in his rude 
semi-articulate way, had a word to speak. A great heart 
laid open to take in this great Universe, and man's Life 
here, and utter a great word about it. A Hero, as I say, in his 
own rude manner ; a wise, gifted, noble-hearted man. And 
now, if we still admire such a man beyond all others, what 
must these wild Norse souls, first awakened into thinking, 
have made of him ! To them, as yet without names for it, 
he was noble and noblest ; Hero, Prophet, God ; Wuotan^ 
the greatest of all. Thought is Thought, however it speak 
or spell itself. Intrinsically, I conjecture, this Odin must 
have been of the same sort of stuff as the greatest kind of 
men. A great thought in the wild deep heart of him ! The 
rough words he articulated, are they not the rudimental roots 
of those English words we still use ? He worked so, in 
that obscure element. But he was as a light kindled in it ; a 
light of Intellect, rude Nobleness of heart, the only kind of 
lights we have yet; a Hero, as I say: and he had to shine 
there, and make his obscure element a little lighter, — as is 
still the task of us all. 

We will fancy him to be the Type Norseman ; the finest 
Teuton whom that race had yet produced. The rude Norse 
heart burst up into boundless admiration round him; into 
adoration. He is as a root of so many great things ; the 
fruit of him is found growing, from deep thousands of years, 



32 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

over the whole field of Teutonic Life. Our own Wednes- 
day, as I said, is it not still Odin's Day? Wednesbury, 
Wansborough, Wanstead, Wandsworth : Odin grew into 
England too, these are still leaves from that root ! He was 
the Chief God to all the Teutonic Peoples ; their Pattern 
Norseman ; — in such way did they admire their Pattern 
Norseman ; that was the fortune he had in the world. 

Thus if the man Odin himself have vanished utterly, 
there is this huge Shadow of him which still projects itself 
over the whole History of his People. For this Odin once 
admitted to be God, we can understand well that the whole 
Scandinavian Scheme of Nature, or dim No-scheme, what- 
ever it might before have been, would now begin to develop 
itself altogether differently, and grow thenceforth in a new 
manner. What this Odin saw into, and taught with his 
runes and his rhymes, the whole Teutonic People laid to 
heart and carried forward. His way of thought became 
their way of thought: — such, under new conditions, is the 
history of every great thinker still. In gigantic confused 
lineaments, like some enormous camera-obscura shadow 
thrown upwards from the dead deeps of the Past, and cover- 
ing the whole Northern Heaven, is not that Scandinavian 
Mythology in some sort the Portraiture of this man Odin? 
The gigantic image of his natural face, legible or not legible 
there, expanded and confused in that manner ! Ah, Thought, 
I say, is always Thought. No great man lives in vain. The 
History of the world is but the Biography of great men. 

To me there is something very touching in this primeval 
figure of Heroism ; in such artless, helpless, but hearty en- 
tire reception of a Hero by his fellow-men. Never so help- 
less in shape, it is the noblest of feelings, and a feeling inF 
some shape or other perennial as man himself. If I could 
show in any measure, what I feel deeply for a long time now, 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 33 

That it is the vital element of manhood, the soul of man's his- 
tory here in our world, — it would be the chief use of this 
discoursing at present. We do not now call our great men 
Gods, nor admire without limit ; ah no, with limit enough ! 
But if we have no great men, or do not admire at all, — that 
were a still worse case. 

This poor Scandinavian Hero-worship, that whole Norse 
way of looking at the Universe, and adjusting one's self 
there, has an indestructible merit for us. A rude childlike 
way of recognizing the divineness of Nature, the divineness 
of Man ; most rude, yet heartfelt, robust, gianthke ; betoken- 
ing what a giant of a man this child would yet grow to ! — It 
was a truth, and is none. Is it not as the half-dumb stifled 
voice of the long-buried generations of our own Fathers, 
calling out of the depths of ages to us, in whose veins their 
blood still runs : This then, this is what we made of the 
world : this is all the image and notion we could form to 
ourselves of this great mystery of a Life and Universe. 
Despise it not. You are raised high above it, to large free 
scope of vision ; but you too are not yet at the top. No, 
your notion too, so much enlarged, is but a partial, imperfect 
one ; that matter is a thing no man will ever, in time or out 
of time, comprehend ; after thousands of years of ever-new 
expansion, man will find himself but struggling to compre- 
hend again a part of it : the thing is larger than man, not 
to be comprehended by him ; an Infinite thing ! " 

The essence of the Scandinavian, as indeed of all Pagan 
Mythologies, we found to be recognition of the divineness 
of Nature ; sincere communion of man with the mysterious 
invisible Powers visibly seen at work in the world round 
him. This, I should say, is more sincerely done in the 
Scandinavian than in any Mythology I know. Sincerity is 



34 LECTURES ON HEROES. 



% 



the great characteristic of it. Superior sincerity (far su< 
perior) consoles us for the total want of old Grecian grace. 
Sincerity, I think, is better than grace. I feel that these 
old Northmen were looking into Nature with open eye and 
soul : most earnest, honest : childlike, and yet manlike ; with 
a gr'::at-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, 
loving, admiring, unfearing way. A right valiant, true old ' 
race of men. Such recognition of Nature one finds to be 
the chief element of Paganism: recognition of Man, and his 
Moral Duty, though this too is not wanting, comes to be 
the chief element only in purer forms of religion. Here, 
indeed, is a great distinction and epoch in Human Beliefs ; 
a great landmark in the religious development of Mankind. 
Man first puts himself in relation with Nature and her 
Powers, wonders and worships over those ; not till a later 
epoch does he discern that all Power is Moral, that the 
grand point is the distinction for him of Good and Evil, of 
Thou shall and Thou shall not. 

With regard to all these fabulous delineations in the Edda. 
I will remark, moreover, as indeed was already hinted, that 
most probably they must have been of much newer date ; 
most probably, even from the first, were comparatively idle' 
for the old Norsemen, and as it were a kind of Poetic sport. 
Allegory and Poetic Delineation, as I said above, cannot be 
religious Faith ; the Faith itself must first be there, then 
Allegory enough will gather round it, as the fit body round I 
its soul. The Norse Faith, I can well suppose, like other 
Faiths, was most active while it lay mainly in the silent 
^tate, and had not yet much to say about itself, still less to 
sing. 

Among those shadowy Edda matters, amid all that fantas- 
tic congeries of assertions, and traditions, in their musical 
]\I^thologies, th^ main practical belief a iiiar^ cguld have \va5 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 35 

probably not much more than this : of the Valkyrs and the 
Hall of Odin J of an inflexible Destiny; and that the one 
thing needful for a man was to be brave. The Valkyrs are 
Choosers of the Slain : a Destiny inexorable, which it is 
useless trying to bend or soften, has appointed who is to be 
slain ; this was a fundamental point for the Norse believer ; 
— as indeed it is for all earnest men everywhere, for a 
Mahomet, a Luther, for a Napoleon too. It lies at the basis 
this for every such man ; it is the woof out of which his 
whole system of thought is woven. The Valkyrs j and then 
that these Choosers lead the brave to a heavenly Hall of 
Odin J only the base and slavish being thrust elsewhither, 
into the realms of Hela the Death-goddess : I take this to 
have been the soul of the whole Norse Belief. They under- 
stood in their heart that it was indispensable to be brave; 
that Odin would have no favor for them, but despise and 
thrust them out, if they were not brave. Consider too 
whether there is not something in this ! It is an everlasting 
duty, valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave. 
Valor is still valne. The first duty for a man is still that 
of subduing Fear. We must get rid of Fear ; we cannot 
act at all till then. A man's acts are slavish, not true 
but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as 
a slave and coward, till he have, got Fear under his feet. 
Odin's creed, if we disentangle the real kernel of it, is true 
to this hour. A man shall and must be valiant ; he must 
march forward, and quit himself like a man, — trusting 
imperturbably in the appointment and choice of the upper 
Powers ; and, on the whole, not fear at all. Now and always, 
the completeness of his victory over Fear will determine how 
much of a man he is. 

It IS doubtless very savage that kind of valor of the old 
Northmen, S^orro tells ws they thought it ^ sh^me aiuj 



2,6 LECTURES ON HEROES, 

misery not to die in battle ; and if natural death seemed to 
be coming on, they would cut wounds in their flesh, that 
Odin might receive them as warriors slain. Old kings, about 
to die, had their body laid into a ship ; the ship sent forth, 
with sails set and slow fire burning it; that, once out at 
sea, it might blaze up in flame, and in such manner bury 
worthily the old hero, at once in the sky and in the ocean ! 
Wild bloody valor, yet valor of its kind ; better, I say, 
than none. In the old Sea-kings too, what an indomitable 
rugged energy ! Silent, with closed lips, as I fancy them, 
unconscious that they were specially brave ; defying the 
wild ocean with its monsters, and all men and things; — 
progenitors of our own Blakes and Nelsons ! No Homer 
sang these Norse Sea-kings; but Agamemnon's was a small 
audacity, and of small fruit in the world, to some of them; 
— to Hrolfs of Normandy, for instance! Hrolf, or Rollo 
Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king, has a share in 
governing England at this hour. 

Nor was it altogether nothing, even that wild sea-roving 
and battling, through so many generations. It needed to be 
ascertained which was the strongest kind of men ; who were 
to be ruler over whom. Among the Northland Sovereigns, 
too, I find some who got the title Wood-cutter j Forest-fel- 
ling Kings. Much lies in that. I suppose at bottom many 
of them were forest-fellers as well as fighters, though the 
Skalds talk mainly of the latter, — misleading certain critics 
not a little ; for no nation of men could ever live by fighting 
alone ; there could not produce enough come out of that ! 
I suppose the right good fighter was oftenest also the right' 
good forest-feller, — the right good improver, discerner, doer 
and worker in every kind ; for true valor, different enough 
from ferocity, is the basis of all. A more legitimate kind 
ot valor that; showing itself against the untamed Forests 







SHINING AND SHAPING ITSELF IN THE HUGE ^'ORTEX OF NORSE 
DARKNESS." — Page 37. 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 37 

and dark brute Powers of Nature, to conquer Nature for us. 
In the same direction have not we their descendants since 
carried it far? May such valor last forever with us ! 

That the man Odin, speaking with a Hero's voice and 
heart, as with an impressiveness out of Heaven, told his 
People the infinite importance of Valor, how man thereby 
became a god ; and that his People, feeling a response to it 
in their own hearts, believed this message of his, and thought 
it a message out of Heaven, and him a Divinity for telling it 
them : this seems to me the primary seed-grain of the Norse 
Rehgion, from which all manner of mythologies, symbolic 
practices, speculations, allegories, songs and sagas would 
naturally grow. Grow, — how strangely ! I called it a 
small light shining and shaping in the huge vortex of Norse 
darkness. Yet the darkness itself was alive ; consider 
that. It was the eager inarticulate uninstructed Mind of 
the whole Norse People, longing only to become articulate, 
to go on articulating ever farther ! The living doctrine 
grows, grows ; — like a Banyan-tree ; the first seed is the 
essential thing : any branch strikes itself down into the 
earth, becomes a new root ; and so, in endless complexity, 
we have a whole wood, a whole jungle, one seed the parent 
of it all. Was not the whole Norse Religion, accordingly, 
in some sense, what we called " the enormous shadow of 
this man's likeness " ? Critics trace some alifinity in some 
Norse mythuses, of the Creation and suchlike, with those of 
the Hindoos. The Cow Adumbla, "licking the rime from 
the rocks," has a kind of Hindoo look. A Hindoo Cow, 
transported into frosty countries. Probably enough ; indeed 
we may say undoubtedly, these things will have a kindred 
with the remotest lands, with the earliest times. Thought 
does not die, but only is changed. The first man that began 
to think in this Planet of ours, he was the beginner of all. 



38 LECTURES ON- HEROES. 

And then the second man, and the third man; — nay, every 
true Thinker to this hour is a kind of Odin, teaches men his 
way of thought, spreads a shadow of his own likeness over 
sections of the History of the World. 

Of the distinctive poetic character or merit of this Norse 
Mythology I have not room to speak ; nor does it concern 
us miich. Some wild Prophecies we have, as the Vohispa 
in the Elder Edda; of a rapt, earnest, sibylline sort. But 
they were comparatively an idle adjunct of the matter, men 
who as it were but toyed with the matter, these later Skalds ; 
and it is their songs chiefly that survive. In later .centuries, 
I suppose, they would go on singing, poetically symbolizing, 
as our modern Painters paint, when it was no longer from 
the innermost heart, or not from the heart at all. This is 
everywhere to be well kept in mind. 

Gray's fragments of Norse Lore, at any rate, will give one 
no notion of it ; — any more than Pope will of Homer, It 
is no square-built gloomy palace of black ashlar marble, 
shrouded in awe and horror, as Gray gives it us : no ; rough 
as the North rocks, as the Iceland deserts, it is; with a 
heartiness, homeliness, even a tint of good humor and 
robust mirth in the middle of these fearful things. The 
strong old Norse heart did not go upon theatrical sublimi- 
ties ; they had not time to tremble. I like much tlieir 
robust simplicity ; their veracity, directness of conception. 
Thor " draws down his brows " in a veritable Norse rage ; 
"grasps his hammer till the kjiiickles grow white.'''' Beauti- 
f^al traits of pity too, an honest pity. Balder " the white 
God " dies ; the beautiful, benignant ; he is the Sungod. 
They try all Nature for a remedy; but he is dead. Frigga, 
his mother, sends Hermoder to seek or see him: nine days 
and nine nights he rides through gloomy deep valleys, a 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 39 

labyrinth of gloom ; arrives at the Bridge with its gold roof . 
the Keeper says, "Yes, Balder did pass here ; but the King- 
dom of the Dead is down yonder, far towards the North." 
Hermoder rides on ; leaps Hell-gate, Hela's gate ; does see 
Balder, and speak with him r Balder cannot be delivered. 
Inexorable! Hela will not, for Odin or any God, give him 
up. The beautiful and gentle has to remain there. His 
Wife had volunteered to go with him, to die with him. They 
shall forever remain there. He sends his ring to Odin ; 
Nanna his wife sends her thimble to Frigga, as a remem- 
brance — Ah me ! — . ■ 

For indeed Valor is the fountain of Pity too ; — of Truth, 
and all that is great and good in man. The robust homely 
vigor of the Norse heart attaches one much, in these 
delineations. Is it not a trait of right honest strength, 
says Uhland, who has written a fine Essay on Thor, that 
the old Norse heart finds its friend in the Thunsfer-god.'* 
That it is not frightened away by his thunder ; but finds t,hat 
Summer-heat, the beautiful noble summer, must and will 
have thunder withal ! The Norse heart loves this Thor and 
his hammer-bolt; sports with him. Thor is Summer-heat; 
the god of Peaceable Industry as well as Thunder. He is 
the Peasant's friend ; his true henchman and attendant is 
Thialfi, Manual Labor. Thor himself engages in all manner 
of rough manual work, scorns no business for its plebeian- 
ism; is ever and anon travelling to the country of the Jotuns, 
harrying those chaotic Frost-monsters, subduing them, at 
least straitening and damaging them. There is a great 
broad humor in som.e of these things. 

Thor, as we saw above, goes to Jotun-land, to seek 
Hymir's Caldron, that the Gods may brew beer. Hymir 
the huge Giant enters, his gray beard all full of hoar-frost; 
splits pillars with the very glance of his eye ; Thor, after 



40 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

much rough tumult, snatches the Pot, claps it on his head; 
the '-handles of it reach down to his heels." The Norse 
Skald has a kind of loving sport with Thor. This is the 
Hymlr whose cattle, the critics have discovered, are Ice- 
bergs. Huge untutored Brobdignag genius, — needing only 
to be tamed down; into Shakspeares, Dantes, Goethes ! It 
is all gone now, that old Norse work, — Thor the Thunder- 
god changed into Jack the Giant-killer : but the mind that 
made it is here yet. How strangely things grow, and die, 
and do not die ! There are twigs of that great world-tree of 
Norse Belief still curiously traceable. This poor Jack of the 
Nursery, with his miraculous shoes of swiftness, coat of 
darkness, sword of sharpness, he is one, Hynde Etin, and 
still more decisively Red Etin of Ireland^ in the Scottish 
Ballads, these are both derived from Norseland ; Eti7i is 
evidently a Jotun. Nay, Shakspeare's Hamlet is a twig 
too of this same world-tree ; there seems no doubt of that. 
Hamlet, Ainleth^ I find, is really a mythic personage ; and 
his Tragedy, of the poisoned Father, poisoned asleep by 
drops in his ear, and the rest, is a Norse mythus ! Old- 
Saxo, as his wont was, made it a Danish history; Shak- 
speare, out of Saxo, made it what we see. That is a twig of 
the world-tree that has ^r^w;^, I think; — by nature or acci- 
dent that one has grown ! 

In fact, these old Norse songs have a triith in them, an 
inward perennial truth and greatness, — as, indeed, all must 
have that can very long preserve itself by tradition alone. 
It is a greatness not of mere body and gigantic bulk, but a 
rude greatness of soul. There is a sublime uncomplaining 
melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A great free glance 
into the very deeps of thought. They seem to have seen, 
these brave old Northmen, what Meditation has taught all 
mren in all ages, That this world is after all but a show, — a 



TilE HERO AS DiVWiTY. 41 

phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All deep souls 
see into that, — the Hindoo Mythologist, the German Philos- 
opher, — the Shakspeare, the earnest Thinker, wherever he 
may be : — 

** We are such stuff as Dreams are made of ! " 

One of Thor's expeditions, to Utgard (the Outer Garden, 
central seat of Jotun-land), is remarkable in this respect. 
Thialfi was with him, and Loke. After various adventures, 
they entered upon Giant-land; wandered over plains, wild 
uncultivated places, among stones and trees. At nightfall 
they noticed a house ; and as the door, which indeed formed 
one whole side of the house, was open, they entered. It was 
a simple habitation ; one large hall, altogether empty. They 
staid there. Suddenly in the dead of the night loud noises 
alarmed them. Thor grasped his hammer; stood in the 
door, prepared for fight. His companions within ran hither 
and thither in their terror, seeking some outlet in that rude 
hall ; they found a little closet at last, and took refuge there. 
Neither had Thor any battle : for, lo, in the morning it 
turned out that the noise had been only the snoring of a 
certain enormous but peaceable Giant, the Giant Skrymir, 
who lay peaceably sleeping near by; and this that they took 
for a house was merely his Glove, thrown aside there ; the 
door was the Glove-wrist; the little closet they had fled into 
was the Thumb ! Such a glove ; — I remark too that it had 
not fingers as ours have, but only a thumb, and the rest 
undivided : a most ancient, rustic glove ! 

Skrymir now carried their portmanteau all day; Thor, 
however, had his own suspicions, did not like the ways of 
Skrymir; determined at night to put an end to him as he 
slept. Raising his hammer, he struck down into the Giant's 
face a right thunderbolt blow, of force to rend rocks. The 



b 



42 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Giant merely awoke ; rubbed his cheek, and said, Did a leai 
fall? Again Thor struck, so soon as Skrymir again slept ; a 
better blow than before ; but the Giant only murmured. Was 
that a grain of sand? Thor's third stroke was with both his 
hands (the " knuckles white " I suppose), and seemed to dint 
deep into Skrymir's visage ; but he merely checked his 
snore, and remarked, There must be sparrows roosting in 
this tree, I think; what is that they have dropt? — At the 
gate of Utgard, a place so high that you had to " strain your 
neck bending back to see the top of it," Skrymir went his 
ways. Thor and his companions were admitted ; invited to 
take share in the games going on. To Thor, for his part, 
they handed a Drinking-horn; it was a common feat, they 
told him, to drink this dry at one draught. Long and fiercely, 
three times over, Thor drank ; but made hardly any impres- 
sion. He was a weak child, they told him : could he lift that 
Cat he saw there? Small as the feat seemed, Thor with his 
whole godlike strength could not ; he bent up the creature's 
back, could not raise its feet off the ground, could at the 
utmost raise one foot. Why, you are no man, said the Ut- 
gard people ; there is an Old Woman that will wrestle you. 
Thor, heartily ashamed, seized this haggard Old Woman ; 
but could not throw her. 

And now, on their quitting Utgard, the chief Jotun, escort- 
ing them politely a little way, said to Thor : " You are 
beaten then : — yet be not so much ashamed ; there was de- 
ception of appearance ni it. That Horn you tried to drink 
was the Sea ; you did make it ebb ; but who could drink that, 
the bottomless ! The Cat you would have lifted, — why, that 
is the Midgard-snake^ the Great World-serpent, which, tail 
in mouth, girds and keeps up the whole created world ; had 
you torn that up, the world must have rushed to ruin ! As 
for the Old Woman, she was Titne, Old Age, Duration : with 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 43 

her what can wrestle ? No man nor no god with her ; gods 
or men, she prevails over all ! And then those three strokes 
you struck, — look at these th7^ee valleys ; your three strokes 
made these ! " Thor looked at his attendant Jotun : it was 
Skrymir; — it was, say Norse critics, the old chaotic rocky 
Earth in person, and that ^ov^-hoiise was some Earth- 
cavern ! But Skrymir had vanished ; Utgard with its sky- 
high gates, when Thor grasped his hammer to smite them, 
had gone to air ; only the Giant's voice was heard mocking : 
" Better come no more to Jotunheim ! " — 

This is of the allegoric period, as we see, and half play, not 
of the prophetic and entirely devout : but as a mythus is there 
not real antique Norse gold in it ? More true metal, rough 
from the Mimer-stithy, than in many a famed Greek Mythus 
shaped far better ! A great broad Brobdignag grin of true 
humor is in this Skrymir; mirth resting on earnestness and 
sadness, as the rainbow on biack tempest : only a right valiant 
heart is capable of that. It is the grim humor of our own 
Ben Jonson, rare old Ben ; runs in the blood of us, I fancy ; 
for one catches tones of it, under a still other shape, out of 
the American Backwoods. 

That is also a very striking conception that of the Rag- 
7iarok^ Consummation, or Twilight of the Gods. It is in the 
Vohispa Song; seemingly a very old, prophetic idea. The 
Gods and Jotuns, the divine Powers and the chaotic brute 
ones, after long contest and partial victory by the former, 
meet at last in universal world-embracing wrestle and duel ; 
World-serpent against Thor, strength against strength ; mu 
tually extinctive ; and ruin, " twilight " sinking into darkness, 
swallows the created Universe. The old Universe with its 
Gods is sunk ; but it is not final death : there is to be a 
new Heaven and a new Earth ; a higher supreme God, and 
Justice to reign among men. Curious ; this law of mutation, 



44 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

which also is a law written in man's inmost thought, had 
been deciphered by these old earnest Thinkers in their 
rude style ; and how, though all dies, and even gods die, 
yet all death is but a phoenix fire-death, and new-birth into 
the Greater and the Better ! It is the fundamental Law 
of Being for a creature made of Time, living in this Place of 
Hope. All earnest men have seen into it ; may still see 
into it. 

And now, connected with this, let us glance at the last 
mythus of the appearance of Thor ; and end there. I fancy 
it to be the latest in date of all these fables ; a sorrowing pro- 
test against the advance of Christianity, — set forth reproach- 
fully by some Conservative Pagan. King Olaf has been 
harshly blamed for his over-zeal in introducing Christianity ; 
surely I should have blamed him far more for an under-zeal 
in that ! He paid dear enough for it; he died by the revolt 
of his Pagan people, in battle, in the year 1033, at Stickel- 
stad, near that Drontheim, where the chief Cathedral of the 
North has now stood for many centuries, dedicated grate- 
fully to his memory as Saint Olaf. The mythus about Thor 
is to this effect. King Olaf, the Christian Reform King, is 
sailing with fit escort along the shore of Norway, from haven 
to haven ; dispensing justice, or doing other royal work : 
on leaving a certain haven, it is found that a stranger, of 
grave eyes and aspect, red beard, of stately robust figure, has 
stept in. The courtiers address him ; his answers surprise 
by their pertinency and depth : at length he is brought to the 
Kinor. The stranger's conversation here is not less remark- 
able, as they sail along the beautiful shore ; but after some 
time, he addresses King Olaf thus: "Yes, King Olaf, it is 
all beautiful, with the sun shining on it there ; green, fruitful, 
a right fair home for you ; and many a sore day had Thor, 
many a wild fight with the rock Jotuns, before he could make 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 45 

it so. And now you seem minded to put away Thor. King 
Olaf, have a care ! " said tlie stranger, drawing down his 
brows; — and when they looked again, he was nowhere to 
be found. — This is the last appearance of Thor on the stage 
of this world ! 

Do we not see well enough how the Fable might arise, 
without unveracity on the part of any one ? It is the way 
most Gods have come to appear among men: thus, if in 
Pindar's time " Neptune was seen once at the Nemean 
Games," what was this Neptune too but a " stranger of noble 
grave aspect," —fit to be " seen " ! There is something 
pathetic, tragic for me in this last voice of Paganism. Thor 
is vanished, the whole Norse world has vanished ; and will 
not return ever again. In like fashion to that pass away the 
highest things. All things that have been in this world, all 
things that are or will be in it, have to vanish : we have our 
sad farewell to give them. 

That Norse Religion, a rude but earnest, sternly impres- 
sive Consecratio7t of Valor (so we may define it), sufficed for 
these old valiant Northmen. Consecration of Valor is not 
a bad thing ! We will take it for good, so far as it goes. 
Neither is there no use in kttowing something about this old 
Paganism of our Fathers. Unconsciously, and combined 
with higher things, it is in us yet, that old Faith withal ! 
To know it consciously, brings us into closer and clearer re- 
lation with the Past, — with our own possessions in the Past. 
For the whole Past, as I keep repeating, is the possession of 
the Present ; the Past had always something true, and is a 
precious possession. In a different time, in a different place, 
it is always some other side of our common Human Nature 
that has been developing itself. The actual True is the S2im 
of all these ; not any one of them by itself constitutes what 
Qf Human Nature is hitherto developed. Better to know 



46 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

them all than misknow them. " To which of these Three 
Religions do you specially adhere ? " inquires Meister of his 
Teacher. " To all the Three ! " answers the other : " To all 
the Three ; for they by their union first constitute the True 
Religion." 



THE HERO AS PROPHET. 47 



LECTURE IL 

THE HERO AS PROPHET. MAHOMET: ISLAM. 
\^Frlday, 8th May, 1S40.] 

FROM the first rude times of Paganism among the Scan- 
dinavians in the North, we advance to a very different 
epoch of religion, among a very different people : Mahomet- 
anism among the Arabs. A great change ; what a change 
and progress is indicated here, in the universal condition 
and thoughts of men ! 

The Hero is not now regarded as a God among his fellow- 
men ; but as one God-mspired, as a Prophet. It is the 
second phasis of Hero-worship : the first or oldest, we may 
say, has passed away without return ; in the history of the 
world there will not again be any man, never so great, whom 
his fellow-men will take for a god. Nay we might rationally 
ask, Did any set of human beings ever really think the man 
they saw there standing beside them a god, the maker of 
this world ? Perhaps not : it was usually some man they 
remembered, or /uici^ seen. But neither can this any more 
be. The Great Man is not recognized henceforth as a god 
any more. 

It was a rude gross error, that of counting the Great Man 
a god. Yet let us say that it is at all times difficult to know 
2u/ia/ he is, or how to account of him and receive him ! The 
niost significant feature jn th^ history- of an epoch is tlie 



48 {LECTURES ON HEROES. 

manner it has of welcoming a Great Man. Ever, to the true 
instincts of men, there is something godhke in him. Whether 
they shall take him to be a god, to be a prophet, or what they, 
shall take him to be ? that is ever a grand question ; by their 
way of answering that, we shall see, as through a little win- 
dow, into the very heart of these men's spiritual condition. 
For at bottom the Great Man, as he comes from the hand of 
Nature, is ever the same kind of thing: Odin, Luther, John- 
son, Burns ; I hope to make it appear that these are all 
originally of one stuff; that only by the world's reception of 
them, and the shapes they assume, are they so immeasurably 
diverse. The worship of Odin astonishes us, — to fall pros- 
trate before the Great Man, into deliqidiuii of love and 
wonder over him, and feel in their hearts that he was a den- 
izen of the skies, a god ! This was imperfect enough : but 
to welcome, for example, a Burns as we did, was that what 
we can call perfect? The most precious gift that Heaven 
can give to the Earth ; a man of "genius " as we call it; the 
Soul of a Man actually sent down from the skies with a 
God's message to us, — this we waste away as an idle arti- 
ficial firework, sent to amuse us a little, and sink, it into 
ashes, wreck and ineffectual ity : such reception of a Great 
Man I do not call very perfect either ! Looking into the 
heart of the thing, one may perhaps call that of Burns a still 
uglier phenomenon, betokening still sadder imperfections in 
mankind's ways, than the Scandinavian method itself! To 
fall into mere unreasoning deliqiiiiun of love and admiration, 
was not good ; but such unreasoning, nay irrational super- 
cilious no-love at all, is perhaps still worse ! — It is a thing 
forever changing, this of Hero-worship : different in each 
age, difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the heart of the 
yyhole business of the age, one may say, is to do it well. 
We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Proph- 




'■ MAHOMET." — Pa£'e 48. 



1 

1 



THE HERO AS PROPHET. 49 

et ; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no 
means the truest of Prophets ; but I do esteem him a true 
one. Farther, as there is no danger of our becoming, any of 
us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the good of him I justly 
can. It is the way to get at his secret; let us try to under- 
stand what he meant with the world ; what the world meant 
and means with him, will then be a more answerable ques- 
tion. Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was 
a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that his reli- 
gion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to 
be now untenable to any one. The lies which well-meaning 
zeal has heaped round this man are disgraceful to ourselves 
only. When Pococke inquired of Grotius, Where the proof 
was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from 
Mahomet's ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him 1 
Grotius answered that there was no proof ! It is really time 
to dismiss all that. The word this man spoke has been the 
life-guidance now of a hundred and eighty millions of men 
these twelve hundred years. These hundred and eighty mil- 
lions were made by God as well as we. A greater number 
of God's creatures believe in Mahomet's word at this hour 
than in any other word whatever. Are we to suppose that it 
was a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain, this which so 
many creatures of the Almighty have lived by and died by ? 
I, for my part, cannot form any such supposition. I will 
believe most things sooner than that. One would be entirely 
at a loss what to think of this world at all, if quackery so 
grew and was sanctioned here. 

Alas, such theories are very lamentable. If we would at- 
tain to knowledge of any thing in God's true Creation, let un 
disbeheve them wholly ! They are the product of an Age of 
Scepticism ; they indicate the saddest spiritual paralysis, and 
mere death-life of the souls of men : more godless theory, I 



50 LECTURES ON HEROES. ,^ 

think, was never promulgated in this Earth. A false man 
found a religion ? Why, a false man cannot build a brick 
house ! If he do not know and follow tJ^uly the properties 
of mortar, burnt clay and what else he works in, it is no 
house that he makes, but a rubbish-heap. It will not stand 
for twelve centuries, to lodge a hundred and eighty millions ; 
it will fall straightway. A man must conform himself to 
Nature's laws, be verily in communion with Nature and the 
truth of things, or Nature will answer him. No, not at all ! 
. Speciosities are specious — ah me ! — a Cagliostro, many Cag- 
liostros, prominent world-leaders, do prosper by their quack- 
ery, for a day. It is like a forged bank-note ; they get it 
passed out of their worthless hands : others, not they, have 
to smart for it. Nature bursts up in fire-flames, French 
Revolutions and suchlike, proclaiming with terrible veracity 
that forged notes are forged. 

But of a Great Man especially, of him I will venture to i 
assert that it is incredible he should have been other than ] 
true. It seems to me the primary foundation of him, and of 
all that can lie in him, this. No Mirabeau, Napoleon, Burns, j 
Cromwell| no man adequate to do any thing, but is first of all 1 
in right earnest about it -A what I call a sincere man. I should 1 
say siticerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first 
characteristic of all men in any way heroic. Not the sincer- 
ity that caJls itself sincere ; ah no, that is a very poor matter 
indeed;— i- a shallow braggart conscious sincerity ;/oftenest 
self-conceit mainly. The Great Man's sincerity is of the 
kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, 
he is conscious rather of ^sincerity ; for what man can walk 
accurately by the law of truth for one day ? No, the Great 
Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps 
does not ask himself if he is so : I would say rather, his 
sincerity does not depend on himself ; he cannot help being 



THE HERO AS PROPHET. 5 I 

sincere ! The great Fact of Existence is great to him. Fly 
as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this 
ReaHty. His mind is so made ; he is great by that, first of 
all. Fearful and wonderful, real as Life, real as Death, is 
this Universe to him. Though all men should forget its 
truth, and walk in a vain show, he cannot. At all moments 
the Flame-image glares in upon him ; undeniable, there, there ! 
— I wish you to take this as my primary definition of a Great 
Man. A little man may have this, it is competent to all men 
that God has made : but a Great Man cannot be without it. 

Such a man is what we call an original man ; he comes to 
us at first-hand. A messenger he, sent from the Infinite Un- 
known with tidings to us. We may call him Poet, Prophet, 
God; — in one way or other, we all feel that the words he 
utters are as no other man's words. Direct from the Inner 
Fact of things ; — he lives, and has to live, in daily commun- 
ion with that. Hearsays cannot hide it from him; he is 
blind, homeless, miserable, following hearsays ; it glares in 
upon him. Really his utterances, are they not a kind of 
"revelation;" — what we must call such for want of some 
other name ? It is from the heart of the world that he comes ; 
he is portion of the primal reality of things. God has made 
many revelations : but this man too, has not God made him, 
the latest and newest of all? The "inspiration of the Al- 
mighty giveth hi7n understanding : " we must listen before 
all to him. 

This Mahomet, then, we will in no wise consider as an 
Inanity and Theatricality, a poor conscious ambitious 
schemer; we cannot conceive him so. The rude message 
he delivered was a real one withal ; an earnest confused 
voice from the unknown Deep. The man's words were not 
false, nor bis workings here below ; no Inanity and Simula- 



52 ■ LECTURES ON HEROES. 

crum ; a fiery mass of Life cast up from the great bosom of 
Nature herself. To kindle the world ; the world's Maker 
had ordered it so. Neither can the faults, imperfections, 
insincerities even, of Mahomet, if such were never so well 
proved against him, shake this primary fact about him. 

On the whole, we make too much of faults ; the details 
of the business hide the real centre of it. Faults ? The 
greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. 
Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might 
know better. Who is called there "the man according to 
God's own heart " ? David, the Hebrew King, had fallen 
into sins enough ; blackest crimes ; there was no want of 
sins. And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask, Is this 
your man according to God's heart? The sneer, I must 
say, seems to me but a shallow one. What are faults, what 
are the outward details of a life ; if the inner secret of it, 
the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended 
struggle of it, be forgotten ? " It is not in man that walketh 
to direct his steps." Of all acts, is not, for a man, repejit- 
ance the most divine ? The deadliest sin, I say, were that 
same supercilious consciousness of no sin ; — that is death ; 
the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility 
and fact ; is dead : it is " pure " as dead dry sand is pure. 
David's hfe and history, as written for us in those Psalms of 
his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's 
moral progress and warfare here below. All earnest souls 
will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest 
human soul towards what is good and best. Struggle often 
baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck ; yet a strug- 
gle never ended ; ever, with tears, repentance, true uncon- 
querable purpose, begun anew. Poor human nature ! Is 
not a man's walking, in truth, always that : "a succession of 
falls " ? Man can do no other, In this wild element of a 



THE HERO AS PROPHET. 53 

Life, he has to struggle onwards ; now fallen, deep-abased ; 
and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, he has 
to rise again, struggle again still onwards. That his strug- 
gle be a faithful unconquerable one : that is the question ot 
questions. We will put up with man) sad details, if the 
soul of it were true. Details by themselves will never teach 
us what it is. I believe we misestimate Mahomet's faults 
even as faults : but the secret of him will never be got by 
dwelhng there. We will leave all this behind us ; and assur- 
ing ourselves that he did mean some true thing, ask candidly 
what it was or might be. 

These Arabs Mahomet was born among are certainly a 
notable people. Their country itself is notable ; the fit hab- 
itation for such a race. Savage inaccessible rock-mountains, 
great grim deserts, alternating with beautiful strips of ver- 
dure : wherever water is, there is greenness, beauty ; odor- 
iferous balm-shrubs, date-trees, frankincense-trees. Consider 
that wide waste horizon of sand, empty, silent, like a sand- 
sea, dividing habitable place from habitable. You are all 
alone there, left alone with the Universe ; by day a fierce sun 
blazing down on it with intolerable radiance ; by night the 
great deep Heaven with its stars. Such a country is fit for 
a swift-handed, deep-hearted race of men. There is some- 
thing most agile, active, and yet most meditative, enthusi- 
astic in the Arab character. The Persians are called the 
French of the East; we will call the Arabs Oriental Italians. 
A gifted noble people ; a people of wild strong feelings, and 
of iron restraint over these : the characteristic of noble- 
mindedness, of genius. The wild Bedouin welcomes the 
stranger to his tent, as one having right to all that is there ; 
were it his worst enemy, he will slay his foal to treat him, 
will serve him with sacred hospitality for three days, will set 



54 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

him fairly on his way; — and then, by another law as sacred, 
kill him if he can. In words too, as in action. They are 
not a loquacious people, taciturn rather; but eloquent, gifted, 
when they do speak. An earnest, truthful kind of men. 
They are, as we know, of Jewish kindred : but with that 
deadly terrible earnestness of the Jews they seem to combine 
something graceful, brilliant, which is not Jewish. They 
had " Poetic contests " among them before the time of 
Mahomet. Sale says, at Ocadh, in the South of Arabia, 
there were yearly fairs, and there, when the merchandising 
was done. Poets sang for prizes ; the wild people gathered 
to hear that. 

One Jewish quality these Arabs manifest ; the outcome of 
many or of all high qualities : what we may call religiosity. 
From of old they had been zealous worshippers, according to 
their light. They worshipped the stars, as Sabeans ; wor- 
shipped many natural objects, — recognized them as symbols, 
immediate manifestations, of the Maker of Nature. It was 
wrong ; and yet not wholly wrong. All God's w^orks are 
still in a sense symbols of God. Do we not, as I urged, 
still account it a merit to recognize a certain inexhaustible 
significance, "poetic beauty" as we name it, in all natural 
objects whatsoever? A man is a poet, and honored, for 
doing that, and speaking or singing it, — a kind of diluted 
worship. They had many Prophets, these Arabs ; Teachers 
each to his tribe, each according to the light he had. But 
indeed, have we not from of old the noblest of proofs, still 
palpable to every one of us, of what devoutness and noble- 
mindedness had dwelt in these rustic thoughtful peoples .'* 
Biblical critics seem agreed that our own Book of Job was 
written in that region of the world. I call that, apart from 
all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written 
with pen. One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew ; such 



THE HEkO AS PROPHET. 55 

a noble universality, different from noble patriotism or sec- 
tarianism, reigns in it. A noble Book; all men's Book! It 
IS our first, oldest statement of the never-ending Problem, — 
man's destiny, and God's ways with him here in this earth. 
And all in such free flowing outlines ; grand in its sincerity, 
in its simplicity; in its epic melody, and repose of reconcile- 
ment. There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding 
heart. So true every way ; true eyesight and vision for all 
tilings; material things no less than spiritual : the Horse, — 
"hast thou clothed his neck with thituderf' — ho, '■^ laughs 
at the shaking of the spear ! " Such living likenesses were 
never since drawn. Sublime sorrow, sublime reconciliation ; 
oldest choral melody as of the heart of mankind ; ■— so soft, 
and great ; as the summer midnight, as the Avorld with its 
seas and stars ! There is nothing written, I think, in the 
Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit. 

To the idolatrous Arabs one of the most ancient universal 
objects of worship was that Black Stone, still kept in the 
building called Caabah at Mecca. Diodorus Siculus men- 
tions this Caabah in a way not to be mistaken, as the oldest, 
most honored temple in his time ; that is, some half-century 
before our era. Silvestre de Sacy says there is some hkeli- 
hood that the Black Stone is an aeroHte. In that case, some 
man might see it fall out of Heaven ! It stands now beside 
the Well Zemzem ; the Caabah is built over both. A Well 
is in all places a beautiful affecting object, gushing out like 
life from the hard earth ; — still more so in those hot dry 
countries, where it is the first condition of being. The Well 
Zemzem has its name from the bubbling sound of the waters, 
zem-zem; they think it is the Well which Hagar found with 
her httle Ishmael in the wilderness : the aerolite and it have 
been sacred now, and had a Caabah over them, for thousands 
of years. A curious object, that Caabah ! There it stands 



56 LECTURES OAT HEROES. 

at this hour, in the black cloth-covering the Sultan sends 
it yearly ; " twenty-seven cubits high ; " with circuit, with 
double circuit of pillars, with festoon-rows of lamps and 
quaint ornaments : the lamps will be lighted again this night, 
— to glitter again under the stars. An authentic fragment 
of the oldest Past. It is the Keblah of all Moslem : from 
Delhi all onwards to Morocco, the eyes of innumerable 
praying men are turned towards it, five times, this day and 
all days : one of the notablest centres in the Habitation of 
Men. 

It had been from the sacredness attached to this Caabah 
Stone and Hagars Well, from the pilgrimings of all tribes 
of Arabs thither, that Mecca took its rise as a Town.. A 
great town once, though much decayed now. It has no nat- 
ural advantage for a town ; stands in a sandy hollow amid 
bare barren hills, at a distance from the sea ; its provisions, 
its very bread, have to be imported. But so many pilgrims 
needed lodgings : and then all places of pilgrimage do, from 
the first, become places of trade. The first day pilgrims 
meet, merchants have also met : where men see themselves 
assembled for one object, they find that they can accomphsh 
other objects which depend on meeting together. Mecca 
became the Fair of all Arabia, and thereby indeed the 
chief staple and warehouse of whatever Commerce there 
was between the Indian and the Western countries, Syria, 
Egypt, even Italy. It had at one time a population of 
100,000 ; buyers, forwarders of those Eastern and Western 
products ; importers for their own behoof of provisions and 
corn. The government was a kind of irregular aristocratic 
republic, not without a touch of theocracy. Ten Men of a 
chief tribe, chosen in some rough way, were Governors of 
Mecca, and Keepers of the Caabah. The Koreish were the 
chief tribe in Mahomet's time \ his own family was of that 




o a, 
^ I 






THE HERO AS PROPHET. 57 

tribe. The rest of the Nation, fractioned and cut asunder 
by deserts, lived under similar rude patriarchal governments 
by one or several : herdsmen, carriers, traders, generally 
robbers too ; being oftenest at war one with another, or with 
all : held together by no open bond, if it were not this meet- 
ing at the Cabaah, where all forms of Arab Idolatry assem- 
bled in common adoration ; — held mainly by the inward 
indissoluble bond of a common blood and language. In 
this way had the Arabs lived for long ages, unnoticed by the 
world ; a people of great qualities, unconsciously waiting for 
the day when they should become notable to all the world. 
Their Idolatries appear to have been in a tottering state ; 
much was getting into confusion and fermentation among 
them. Obscure tidings of the most important Event ever 
transacted in this world, the Life and Death of the Divine 
Man in Judea, at once the symptom and cause of immeasur- 
able change to all people in the world, had in the course 
of centuries reached into Arabia too ; and cp*ild not but, of 
itself, have produced fermentation there, 

It was among this Arab people, so circumstanced, in the 
year 570 of our Era, that the man Mahomet was born. He 
was of the family of Hashem, of the Koreish tribe as we said ; 
though poor, connected with the chief persons of his country. 
Almost at his birth he lost his Father; at the age of six 
years his Mother too, a woman noted for her beauty, her 
worth and sense : he fell to the charge of his Grandfather, an 
old man, a hundred years old. A good old man : Mahomet's 
Father, Abdallah, had been his youngest favorite son. He 
saw in Mahomet, with his old life-worn eyes, a century 
old, the lost Abdallah come back again, all that was left of 
Abdallah. He loved the little orphan Boy greatly ; used to 
say, They must take care of that beautiful little Boy, nothing 
in their kindred was more precious than he. At his death, 



5^ 



LECTURES OM HEROES. 



while the boy Was still but two years old, he left him in charge 
to Abu Thaleb the eldest of the Uncles, as to him that now ? 
Was head of the house. By this Uncle, a just and rational 
man as every thing betokens, Mahomet was brought up in the 
best Arab way. 

Mahomet, as he grew lip, accompanied his Uncle on trad 
ing journeys and suchhke ; in his eighteenth year one finds 
him a fighter following his Uncle in war. But perhaps the 
most significant of all his journeys is one w^e find noted as of 
some years' earlier date : a journey to the Fairs of Syria, 
The young man here first came in contact with a quite for- 
eign world, — with one foreign element of endless moment 
to him : the Christian Religion. I know not what to make 
of that " Sergius, the Nestorian Monk," whom Abu Thaleb 
and he are said to have lodged with ; or how much any monk 
could have taught one still so young. Probably enough it is 
greatly exaggerated, this of the Nestorian Monk. Mahomet 
was only fourteen ; had no language but his own : much in 
Syria must have been a strange unintelligible whirlpool to 
him. But the eyes of the lad were open ; glimpses of many 
things would doubtless be taken in, and lie very enigmatic 
as yet, which were to ripen in a strange way into views, into 
beliefs and insights, one day. These journeys to Syria were 
probably the beginning of much to Mahomet. 

One other circumstance we must not forget : that he had 
no school-learning; of the thing we call school-learning none 
at all. The art of writing was but just introduced into 
Arabia ; it seems to be the true opinion that Mahomet never 
could write ! Life in the Desert, with its experiences, was 
all his education. What of this infinite Universe he, from 
his dim place, with his own eyes and thoughts, could take in, 
so much and no more of it was he to know. Curious, if we 
will reflect on it, this of having no books. Except by what 



THE HERO AS PROPHET. 59 

he could see for himself, or hear of by uncertain rumor of 
speech in the obscure Arabian Desert, he could know noth- 
ing. The wisdom that had been before him or at a distance 
from him in the world, was in a manner as good as not there 
for him. Of the great brother souls, flame-beacons through 
so many lands and times, no one directly communicates with 
this great soul. He is alone there, deep down in the bosom 
of the Wilderness ; has to grow up so, — alone with Nature 
and his own Thoughts. 

But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a thought- 
ful man. His companions named him ^'- Al Ainin., The Faith- 
ful." A man of truth and fidelity ; true in what he did, in 
what he spake and thought. They noted that he always 
meant something. A man rather taciturn in speech ; silent 
when there was nothing to be said ; but pertinent, wise, sin- 
cere, when he did speak ; always throwing light on the mat- 
ter. This is the only sort of speech worth speaking ! 
Through life we find him to have been regarded as an alto- 
gether solid, brotherly, genuine man. A serious, sincere 
character ; yet amiable, cordial, companionable, jocose even ; 
— a good laugh in him withal : there are men whose laugh is 
as untrue as anything about them ; who cannot laugh. One 
hears of Mahomet's beauty : his fine sagacious honest face, 
brown florid complexion, beaming black eyes ; — I somehow 
like too that vein on the brow, which swelled up black when 
he was in anger: like the ^'•horseshoe vein" in Scott's Red- 
gauntlet. It was a kind of feature in the Hashem family, 
this black swelling vein in the brow ; Mahomet had it prom- 
inent, as would appear. A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, 
true-meaning man ! Full of wild faculty, fire and light ; of 
wild worth, all uncultured ; working out his life-task in the 
depths of the Desert there. 

How he was placed with Kadijah, a rich Widow, as her 



60 LECTURES 0^ HEROES. 

Steward, and travelled in her business, again to the Fairs of 
Syria ; how he managed all, as'one can well understand, with 
fidelity, adroitness ; how her gratitude, her regard for him, 
grew : the story of their marriage is altogether a graceful 
intelhgible one, as told us by the Arab authors. He was 
twenty-five ; she forty, though still beautiful. He seems to 
have lived in a most affectionate, peaceable, wholesome way 
with this wedded benefactress ; loving her truly, and her 
alone. It goes greatly against the impostor theory, the fact 
that he lived in this entirely unexceptionable, entirely quiet 
and commonplace way, till the heat of his years was done. 
He was forty before he talked of any mission from Heaven. 
All his irregularities, real and supposed, date from after his 
fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. All his "ambi- 
tion," seemingly, had been, hitherto, to Hve an honest life; 
his "fame," the mere good opinion of neighbors that knew 
him, had been sufficient hitherto. Not till he was already 
getting old, the prurient heat of his life all burnt out, 2Mdipeace 
growing to be the chief thing this world could give him, 
did he start on the " career of ambition ; " and, belying all 
his past character and existence, set up as a wretched empty 
charlatan to acquire what he could now no longer enjoy ! 
For my share, I have no faith whatever in that. 

Ah no : this deep-hearted Son of the Wilderness, with his 
beaming black eyes and open social deep soul, had other 
thoughts in him than ambition. A silent great soul ; he was 
one of those who cannot but be in earnest ; whom Nature 
herself has appointed to be sincere. While others walk in 
formulas and hearsays, contented enough to dwell there, this 
man could not screen himself in formulas ; he was alone with 
his own soul and the reality of things. The great Mystery 
of Existence, as I said, glared in upon him, with its terrors, 
with its splendors ; no hearsays could hide that unspeaka- 



THE HERO AS PROPHET, 6 1 

ble fact, " Here am I ! " Such sincerity^ as we named it, has 
in very truth something of divine. The word of such a man is 
a Voice direct from Nature's own Heart. Men do and must 
listen to that as to nothing else ; — all else is wind in com- 
parison. From of old, a thousand thoughts, in his pilgrimings 
and wanderings, had been, in this man : What am 1 1 What is 
this unfathomable Thing I live in, which men name Universe ? 
What is Life ; what is Death ? What am I to believe ? 
What am I to do ? The grim rocks of Mount Hara, of Mount 
Sinai, the stern sandy solitudes answered not. The great 
Heaven rolling silent overhead, with its blue-glancing stars, 
answered not. There was no answer. The man's own soul, 
and what of God's inspiration dwelt there, had to answer ! 

It is the thing which all men have to ask themselves ; which 
we too have to ask, and answer. This wild man felt it to be 
of infinite moment ; all other things of no moment whatever 
in comparison. The jargon of argumentative Greek Sects, 
vague traditions of Jews, the stupid routine of Arab Idola- 
try : there was no answer in these. A Hero, as I repeat, has 
this first distinction, which indeed we may call first and last, 
the Alpha afid Omega of his whole Heroism, That he looks 
through the shows of things into things. Use and wont, 
respectable hearsay, respectable formula : all these are good, 
or are not good. There is something behind and beyond all 
these, which all these must correspond with, be the image 
of, or they are — Idolatries j " bits of black wood pretending 
to be God ; " to the earnest soul a mockery and abomination. 
Idolatries never so gilded, waited on by heads of the Koreish, 
will do nothing for this man. Though all men walk by them, 
what good is it '^. The great Reality stands glaring there 
upon him. He there has to answer it, or perish miserably 
Now, even now, or else through all Eternity never ! Answer 
it ; thoti must find an answer. — Ambition ? What could all 



62 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Arabia do for this man ; with the crown of Greek Heraclius, 
of Persian Chosroes, and all crowns in the Earth; — what 
could they all do for him ? It was not of the Earth he wanted 
to hear tell; it was of the Heaven above and of the Hell 
beneath. All crowns and sovereignties whatsoever, where 
would they in a few brief years be? To be Sheik of M.cca 
or Arabia, and have a bit of gilt wood put into your hand, — 
will that be one's salvation ? I decidedly think, not. We 
will leave it all together, this impostor hypothesis, as not 
credible ; not very tolerable even, worthy chiefly of dismissal 
by us. 

Mahomet had been wont to retire yearly, during the month 
Ramadhan, into solitude and silence ; as indeed was the 
Arab custom ; a praiseworthy custom, which such a man, 
above all, would find natural and useful. Communing with 
his own heart, in the silence of the mountains ; himself 
silent ; open to the " small still voices : " it was a right 
natural custom ! Mahomet was in his fortieth year, when 
having withdrawn to a cavern in Mount Hara, near Mecca, 
during this Ramadhan, to pass the month in prayer, and 
meditation on those great questions, he one day told his wife 
Kadijah, who with his household was with him or near him 
this year, That by the unspeakable special favor of Heaven 
he had now found it all out ; was in doubt and darkness no 
longer, but saw it all. That all these Idols and Formulas 
were nothing, miserable bits of wood ; that there was One 
God in and over all ; and we must leave all Idols, and look 
to Him. That God is great; and that there is nothing else 
great ! He is the Reahty. Wooden Idols are not real ; He 
is real. He made us at first, sustains us yet; we and all 
things are but the shadow of Him; a transitory garment 
veiling the Eternal Splendor. '■'■Allah akbar\ God is 
^reat ; " — and then also " Islam^'' That we must siibmit to 



THE HERO AS PROPHET. 63 

God. That our whole strength lies in resigned submission 
to Him, whatsoever He do to us. For this world, and for 
the other ! The thing He sends to us, were it death and 
worse than death, shall be good, shall be best; we resign 
ourselves to God. — "If this be Islainr says Goethe, "do 
we not all live in Islam ? " Yes, all of us that have any- 
moral life ; we all live so. It has ever been held the highest 
wisdom for a man not merely to submit to Necessity, — 
Necessity will make him submit, — but to know and believe 
well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was 
the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his 
frantic pretension of scanning this great God's World in his 
small fraction of a brain ; to know that it //<2^ verily, though 
deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it 
was Good ; — that his part in it was to conform to the Law 
of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not ques- 
tioning it, obeying it as unquestionable. 

I say, this is yet the only true morality known. A man is 
right and invincible, virtuous and on the road towards sure 
conquest, precisely while he joins himself to the great deep 
Law of the World, in spite of all superficial laws, temporary 
appearances, profit-and-loss calculations ; he is victorious 
while he co-operates with that great central Law, not vic- 
torious otherwise: ■ — and surely his first chance of co-oper- 
ating with it, or getting into the course of it, is to know with 
his whole soul that it is ; that it is good, and alone good ! 
This is the soul of Islam; it is properly the soul of Chris- 
tianity; — for Islam is definable as a confused form of 
Christianity; had Christianity not been, neither had it been. 
Christianity also commands us, before all, to be resigned to 
God. We are to take no counsel with flesh-and-blood ; give 
ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes; to know that 
we know nothing ; that the worst and crudest to our eyes is 



64 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

not what it seems ; that we have to receive whatsoever 
befalls us as sent from God above, and say, It is good and 
wise, God is great ! " Though He slay me, yet will I trust 
in Him." Islam means in its way Denial of Self, Annihila- 
tion of Self. This is yet the highest Wisdom that Heaven 
has revealed to our Earth. 

Such light had come, as it could, to illuminate the darkness 
of this wild Arab soul. A confused dazzling splendor as of 
life and Heaven, in the great darkness which threatened to 
be death : he called it revelation and the angel Gabriel ; — 
who of us yet can know what to call it? It is the "inspi- 
ration of the Almighty that giveth us understanding. To 
know J to get into the truth of any thing, is ever a mystic 
act, — of which the best Logics can but babble on the sur- 
face. " Is not Behef the true god-announcing Miracle ? " 
says Novalis. — That Mahomet's whole soul, set in flame 
with this grand Truth vouchsafed him, should feel as if it 
were important and the only important thing, was very 
natural. That Providence had unspeakably honored hi7n 
by revealing it, saving him from death and darkness ; that 
he therefore was bound to make known the same to all 
creatures : this is what was meant by " Mahomet is the 
Prophet of God ; " this too is not without its true mean- 
ing. 

The good Kadijah, we can fancy, listened to him with 
wonder, with doubt : at length she answered : Yes, it was 
ti'ue this that he said. One can fancy too the boundless 
gratitude of Mahomet; and how of all the kindnesses she 
had done him, this of believing the earnest struggling word 
he now spoke was the greatest. " It is certain," says 
Novalis, " my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment 
another soul will believe in it." It is a boundless favor. — 
He never forgot this good Kadijah. Long afterwards, 



THE HERO AS PROPHET. 65 

Ayesha his young favorite wife, a woman who nicleed dis- 
tinguished herself among the Moslem, by all manner of 
qualities, through her whole long life ; this young brilliant 
Ayesha was, one day, questioning him : " Now am not I 
better than Kadijah ? She was a widow; old, and had lost 
her looks : you love me better than you did her ? " — " No, 
by Allah ! " answered Mahomet : " No, by Allah ! She 
believed in me when none else would believe. In the whole 
world I had but one friend, and she was that ! " — Seid, his 
Slave, also believed in him ; these with his young Cousin 
Ali, Abu Thaleb's son, were his first converts. 

He spoke of his Doctrine to this man and that ; but the 
most treated it with ridicule, with indifference ; in three 
years, I think, he had gai..ed but thirteen followers. His 
progress was slow enough. H-is encouragement to go on, 
was altogether the usual encouragement that such a man in 
such a case meets. After some three yeart of small success, 
he invited forty of his chief kindred to an ente/tainment ; 
and there stood up and told them what his pretension was : 
that he had this thing to promulgate abroad to all men ; that 
it was the highest thing, the one thing : which of them 
would second him in that ? Amid the doubt and silence of 
all, young AH, as yet a lad of sixteen, impatient of the 
silence, started up, and exclaimed in passionate fierce 
language, That he would ! The assembly, among whom 
was Abu Thaleb, All's Father, could not be unfriendly to 
Mahomet ; yet the sight there, of one unlettered elderly man, 
with a lad of sixteen, deciding on such an enterprise against 
all mankind, appeared ridiculous to them ; the assembly 
broke up in laughter. Nevertheless it proved not a laugh- 
able thing; it was a very serious thing! As for this young 
Ali, one cannot but like him. A noble-minded creature, as 
he shows himself, now and always afterwards 5 ftill of affec- 



66 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

tion, of fiery daring. Something chivalrous in him ; brave 
as a lion; yet with a grace, a truth and affection worthy of 
Christian knighthood. He died by assassination in the 
Mosque at Bagdad ; a death occasioned by his own generous 
fairness, confidence in the fairness of others ; he said, If the 
wound proved not unto death, they must pardon the Assas- , 
sin ; but if it did, then they must slay him straightway, that _ 
so they two in the same hour might appear before God, and 
see which side of that quarrel was tlie just one ! 

Mahomet naturally gave offence to the Koreish, Keepers, 
of the Caabah, superintendents of the Idols. One or two 
men of influence had joined him; the thing spread slowly, 
but it was spreading. Naturally he gave offence to every- 
body : Who is this that pretends to be wiser than we all; 
that rebukes us all, as mere fools and worshippers of wood ! 
Abu Thaleb the good Uncle spoke with him : Could he not 
be silent about all that ; believe it all for himself, and not 
trouble others, anger the chief men, endanger himself and 
them all, talking of it ? Mahomet answered : If the Sun 
stood on his right hand and the Moon on his left, ordering 
him to hold his peace, he could not obey ! No : there was 
something in this Truth he had got which was of Nature 
herself ; equal in rank to Sun, or Moon, or whatsoever thing 
Nature had made. It would speak itself there, so long as 
the Almighty allowed it, in spite of Sun and Moon, and all 
Koreish and all men and things. It must do that, and could 
do no other. Mahomet answered so; and, they say, "burst 
into tears." Burst into tears : he felt that Abu Thaleb was 
good to him; that the task he had got was no soft, but a 
stern and great one. 

He went on speaking to who would listen to him ; pub- 
lishing his Doctrine among the pilgrims as they came to 
Mecca; gaining adherents in this- place and that. Continual 



THE HERO AS PROPHET. 6/ 

contradiction, hatred, open or secret danger, attended him, 
His powerful relations protected Mahomet himself; but by 
and by, on his own advice, all his adherents had to quit 
Mecca, and seek refuge in Abyssinia over the sea. The 
Koreish grew ever angrier; laid plots, and swore oaths 
among them, to put Mahomet to death with their own 
hands. Abu Thaleb was dead, the good Kadijah was dead. 
Mahomet is not solicitous of sympathy from us ; but his out- 
look at this time was one of the dismalest. He had to hide 
in caverns, escape in disguise; fly hither and thither; home- 
less, in continual peril of his life. More than once it seemed 
all over with him ; more than once it turned on a straw, some 
rider's horse taking fright or the like, whether Mahomet and 
his Doctrine had not ended there, and not been heard of at 
all. But it was not to end so. 

In the thirteenth year of his mission, finding his enemies 
all banded against him, forty sworn men, one out of every 
tribe, waiting to take his life, and no continuance possible at 
Mecca for him any longer, Mahomet fled to the place then 
called Yathreb, where he had gained some adherents; the 
place they now call Medina, or ''Medinat al A^abi, the City 
of the Prophet," from that circumstance. It lay some 200 
miles off, through rocks and deserts ; not without great ^diffi- 
culty, in such mood as we may fancy, he escaped thither, and 
found welcome. The whole East dates its era from this 
Flight, Heglra as they name it: the Year i of this Hegira is 
622 of our Era, the fifty-third of Mahomet's life. He was 
now becoming an old man; his friends sinking round him 
one by one; his path desolate, encompassed with danger: 
unless he could find hope in his own heart, the outward face 
of things was but hopeless for him. It is so with all men in 
the like case. Hitherto Mahomet had professed to publish 
his Religion by the way of preaching and persuasion alone 



6S LECTURES ON HEROES. 

But now, driven foully out of his native country, since unjust 
men had not only given no ear to his earnest Heaven's mes- 
sage, the deep cry of his heart, but would not even let him 
live if he kept speaking it, — the wild Son of the Desert 
resolved to defend himself, like a man and Arab. If the 
Koreish will have it so, they shall have it. Tidings, felt to 
be of infinite moment to them and all men, they would not 
listen to these ; would trample them down by sheer violence, 
steel and murder: Avell, let steel try it then! Ten years 
more this Mahomet had ; all of fighting, of breathless impet- 
uous toil and strus^o-le ; with what result we know. 

Much has been said of Mahomet's propagating his Reli- 
gion by the sword. It is no doubt far nobler what we have 
to boast of the Christian Religion, that it propagated itself 
peaceably in the way of preaching and conviction. Yet 
withal, if we take this for an argument of the truth or false- 
hood of a religion, there is a radical mistake in it. The^ 
sword indeed : but where will you get your sword ! Everyf- 
new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one. 
In one man's head alone, there it dwells as yet. One man 
alone, of the whole world beheves it ; there is one man against 
all men. That he take a sword, and try to j^ropagate with 
that, will do little for him. You must first get your sword ! 
On the whole, a thing will propagate itself as it can. We do 
not find, of the Christian Religion either, that it always dis- 
dained the sword, when once it had got one. Charlemagne's i 
conversion of the Saxons was not by preaching. I care little 
about the sword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in 
this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or 
can la}^ hold of. We will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and 
fight, and to the uttermost bestir itself, and do, beak and 
claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that it will, in the long 
run, conquer nothing which does not deserve tp b? conquered. 



THE HERO AS PROPHET. 6^ 

VVhat is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only what 
is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and 
can do no wrong : the thing which is deepest-rooted in Na- 
ture, wdiat we call truest, that thing and not the other will be 
found growing at last. 

Here however, in reference to much that there is in Ma- 
homet and his success, we are to remember what an umpire 
Nature is ; what a greatness, composure of depth and toler- 
ance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's 
bosom : your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, 
barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: 
you cast it into the kind just Earth ; she grows the wheat, — 
the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says 
nothing of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is growing there ; 
the good Earth is silent about all the rest, — has silently 
turned all the rest to some benefit too, and' makes no com- 
plaint about it ! So everywhere in Nature ! She is true and 
not a lie ; and yet so great, and just, and motherly in her 
truth. She requires of a thing only that it be genuine of 
heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not so. There is 
a soul of truth in all the thins^s she ever grave harbor to. 
Alas, is not this the history of all highest Truth that comes 
or ever came into the world? The body oi them all is im- 
perfection, an element of light in darkness : to us they have 
to come embodied in mere Logic, in some merely scientific 
Theorem of the Universe ; which camiothe complete ; which 
cannot but be found, one day, ///complete, erroneous, and so 
die and disappear. The body of all Truth dies ; and yet in 
all, I say, there is a soul which never dies; which in new 
and ever-nobler embodiment lives immortal as man himself! 
It is the way wnth Nature. The genuine essence of Truth 
never dies. That it be genuine, a voice from the great Deep 
of Nature, there is the point at Nature's judgment-seat 



70 LECTURES ON- HEROES. 

What we call pure or impure, is not with her the final ques 
tion. Not how much chaff is in you ; but whether you 
have any wheat. Pure ? I might say to many a man : Yes, 
you are pure; pure enough; but you are chaff, — insincere 
hypothesis, hearsay, formality ; you never were in contact 
with the great heart of the Universe at all; you are properly 
neither pure nor impure ; you are nothing, Nature has no 
business with you. 

Mahomet's Creed we called a kind of Christianity : and 
really, if we look at the wild rapt earnestness with which it 
was believed and laid to heart, I should say a better kind 
than that of those miserable Syrian Sects, with their vain 
janglings about Homoiousion and Homoousion^ the head full 
of worthless noise, the heart empty and dead ! The truth of 
it is embedded in portentous error and falsehood ; but the 
truth of it makeS it be believed, not the falsehood : it suc- 
ceeded by its truth. A bastard kind of Christianity, but a 
living kind; wath a heart-life in it; not dead, chopping bar- 
ren logic merely ! Out of all that rubbish of Arab idolatries, 
argumentative theologies, traditions, subtleties, rumors and 
hypotheses of Greeks and Jews, with their idle wiredrawings, 
this wild man of the Desert, with his wild sincere heart, 
earnest as death and life, with his great flashing natural eye- 
sight, had seen into the kernel of the matter. Idolatry is 
nothing: these Wooden Idols of yours, "ye rub them with 
oil and wax, and the flies stick on them," — these are wood, 
I tell you ! They can do nothing for you ; they are an im- 
potent blasphemous pretence ; a horror and abomination, if 
ye knew them. God alone is ; God alone has power ; He 
made us. He can kill us and keep us alive: '■'•Allah akbar^ 

)d is great." Understand that His will is the best for you : 
thatNiQW^ever sore to flesh-and-blood, you will find it the 
wisest, best: you are bound to take it so; in this world 



THE HERO AS PROPHET. 7 1 

and in the next, you have no other thing that you can 



And now if the wild idolatrous men did believe this, and 
with their fiery hearts lay hold of it to do it, in what form 
soever it came to them, I say it was well worthy of being 
believed. In one form or the other, I say it is still the one 
thing worthy of being believed by all men. Man does hereby 
become the high-priest of this Temple of a World. He is 
in harmony with the Decrees of the Author of this World; 
co-operating with them, not vainly withstanding them: I 
know, to this day, no better definition of Duty than that same. 
All that is ?-igJit includes itself in this of co-operating wnth 
the real Tendency of the World : you succeed by this (the 
World's Tendency will succeed), you are good, and in the 
right course there. Homoiousion\ Hofnooiision, vain logical 
jangle, then or before or at any time, may jangle itself out, 
and go whither and how it likes : this is the thing it all strug- 
gles to mean, if it would mean any thing. If it do not succeed 
in meaning this, it means nothing. Not that Abstractions, 
logical Propositions, be correctly worded or incorrectly ; but 
that living concrete Sons of Adam do lay this to heart : that 
is the important point. Islam devoured all these vain jan- 
gling Sects ; and I think had right to do so. It was a Reality, 
direct from the great Heart of Nature once more. Arab 
idolatries, Syrian formulas, whatsoever was not equally real, 
had to go up. in flame, — mere dead fuel, in various senses, 
for this which \\2i's,Jire. 

It was during these wild warfarings and stragglings, 
especially after the Flight to Mecca, that Mahomet dictated 
at intervals his Sacred Book, which they name Koran, or 
Readincr-, " Thing- to be read." This is the Work he and his 
disciples made so much of, asking all the world. Is not that a 



72 LECTURES ON HEROE.^. 

miracle? The Mahometans regard their Koran with a rever 
ence which few Christians pay even tO their Bible. It is ad- 
mitted everywhere as the standard of all law and all practice ; 
the thing to be gone upon in speculation and life : the mes- 
sage sent direct out of Heaven, which this Earth has to coni- 
form to, and walk by ; the thing to be read. Their Judges 
decide by it ; all Moslem are bound to study it, seek in it 
for the light of their life. They have mosques where it is all 
read daily \ thirty relays of priests take it up in succession, 
get through the whole each day. There, for twelve hundred 
years, has the voice of this Book, at all moments, kept 
sounding through the ears and the hearts of so many men. 
We hear of Mahometan Doctors that had read it seventy 
thousand times ! 

Very curious : if one sought for " discrepancies of national 
taste," here surely were the most eminent instance of that! 
We also can read the Koran; our Translation of it, by Sale, 
is known to be a very fair one. I must say, it is as toilsome 
reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, 
crude, incondite; endless iterations, long windedness, en- 
tanglement ; most crude, incondite ; — insupportable stupidity, 
in short ! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any Euro- 
pean through the Koran. We read in it, as we might in the 
State-Paper Office, unreadable masses of lumber, that perhaps 
we may get some glimpses of a remarkable man. It is true 
we Ijave it under disadvantages : the Arabs see more method 
in it than we. Mahomet's followers found the Koran lying all 
infractions, as it had been written down at first promulgation ; 
much of it, they say, on shoulder-blades of mutton, flung pell- 
mell into a chest: and they published it, without any discov- 
erable order as to time or otherwise; — merely trying, as 
would seem, and this not very strictly, to put the longest 
chapters first. The real beginning of it, in that way, lies 



TM^ HERO AS PROPHET. 73 

almost at the end: for the earliest portions were the short- 
est. Read in its historical sequence it perhaps would not 
be so bad. Much of it, too, they say, is rhythmic ; a kind of 
wild chanting song, in the original. This may be a great 
point ; much perhaps has been lost in the Translation here. 
Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any 
mortal ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in 
Heaven, too good for the Earth ; as a well-written book, or 
indeed as 2i book at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody; 
written, so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book 
ever was ! So much for national discrepancies, and the 
standard of taste. 

Yet I should say, it was not unintelligible how the Arabs 
might so love it. When once you get this confused coil of a 
Koran fairly off your hands, and have it behind you at a 
distance, the essential type of it begins to disclose itself ; and 
in this there is a merit quite other than the literary one. If 
a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other 
hearts ; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that. 
One would say the primary character of the Koran is this of 
its genuineness, of its being a bona-fide book. Prideaux, I 
know, and others have represented it as a mere bundle of 
juggleries; chapter after chapter got up to excuse and var- 
nish the author's successive sins, forward his ambitions and 
quackeries : but really it is time to dismiss all that. I do 
not assert Mahomet's continual sincerity : who is continu- 
ally sincere ? But I confess I can make nothing of the critic, 
in these times, who would accuse him of 6.QQ.e.\t prepense j of 
conscious deceit generally, or perhaps at all ; — still more, 
of living in a mere element of conscious deceit, and writing 
this Koran as a forger and juggler would have done ! Every 
candid eye, I think, will read the Koran far otherwise than 
so. It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; 



74 Lectures om heroes. 

rude, untutored, that cannot even read ; but fervent, earnest, 
struggling vehemently to utter itself in words. With a kind 
of breathless intensity he strives to utter himself ; the 
thoughts crowd on him pellmell : for very multitude of things 
to say, he can get nothing said. The meaning that is in 
him shapes itself into no form of composition, is stated in 
no sequence, method, or coherence ; — they are not shaped 
at all, these thoughts of his ; flung out unshaped, as they 
struggle and tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate 
state. We said " stupid : " yet natural stupidity is by no 
means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is natural 
uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking; 
in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, has not 
time to mature himself into fit speech. The panting breath- 
less haste and vehemence of a man struggling in the thick 
of battle for life and salvation; this is the mood he is 
in ! A headlong haste ; for very magnitude of meaning, 
he cannot get himself articulated into words. The suc- 
cessive utterances of a soul in that mood, colored by the 
various vicissitudes of three and twenty years ; now well 
uttered, now worse : this is the Koran. 

F'or we are to consider Mahomet, through these three and 
twenty years, as the centre of a world wholly in conflict. 
Battles with the Koreish and Heathen, quarrels among his 
own people, backshdings of his own wild heart ; all this kept 
him in a perpetual whirl, his soul knowing rest no more. In 
wakeful nights, as one may fancy, the wild soul of the man, 
tossing amid these vortices, would hail any light of a 
decision for them as a veritable light from Heaven ; any 
making-up of his mind, so blessed, indispensable for him 
there, would seem the inspiration of a Gabriel. Forger and 
juggler? No, no! This great fiery heart, seething, sim- 
mering like a great furnace of thoughts, was not a juggler's. 



Tl-IE HkRO AS PROPHET. 7^ 

His life was a Fact to him; this God's Universe an awful 
Fact and ReaHty. He has faults enough. The man was an 
uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the 
Bedouin still chnging to him : we must take him for that. 
But for a wretched Simulacrum, a hungry Impostor without 
eyes or heart, practising for a mess of pottage such blas- 
phemous swindlery, forgery of celestial documents, contin- 
ual high-treason against his Maker and Self, we will not and 
cannot take him. 

Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the 
Koran; what had rendered it precious to the wild Arab men. 
It is, after all, the first and last merit in a book ; gives rise 
to merits of all kinds, — nay, at bottom, it alone can give rise 
to merit of any kind. Curiously, through these incondite 
masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in 
the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of w^iat we might 
almost call poetry, is found straggling. The body of the 
Book is made up of mere tradition, and as it were vehement 
enthusiastic extempore preaching. He returns forever to 
the old stories of the Prophets as they went current in the 
Arab memory : how Prophet after Prophet, the Prophet 
Abraham, the Prophet Hud, the Prophet Moses, Christian 
and other real and fabulous Prophets, had come to this 
Tribe and to that, warning men of their sin ; and been 
received by them even as he Mahomet was, — which is a 
great solace to him. These things he repeats ten, perhaps 
twenty times; again and ever again, with wearisome itera- 
tion ; has never done repeating them. A brave Samuel 
Johnson, in his forlorn garret, might con over the Biographies 
of Authors in that way! This is the great staple of the 
Koran. But curiously, through all this, comes ever and 
anon some glance as of the real thinker and seer. He has 
actually an eye for the world, this Mahomet : with a certain 



^6 Lectures oat heroes. 

directness and rugged vigor, he brings home still, to ouf 
heart, the thing his own heart has been opened to. I make 
but little of his praises of Allah, which many praise; they 
are borrowed I suppose mainly from the Hebrew, at least 
they are far surpassed there. But the eye that flashes direct 
into the heart of things, and sees the truth of them; this is 
to me a highly interesting object. Great Nature's own gift; 
which she bestows on all; but which only one in the thou- 
sand does not cast sorrowfully away: it is what I call 
sincerity of vision; the test of a sincere heart. 

Mahomet can work no miracles: he often answers impa- 
tiently: I can work no miracles. I? "I am a Public 
Preacher;" appointed to preach this doctrine to all creatures. 
Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all 
one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is 
it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly "a sign to you," 
if your eyes were open ! This Earth, God made it for you; 
"appointed paths in it; " you can live in it, go to and fro on 
it. — The clouds in the dry country of Arabia, to Mahomet 
they are very wonderful : Great clouds, he says, born in the 
deep bosom of the Upper Immensity, where do they come 
from ! They hang there, the great black monsters ; pour 
down their rain-deluges " to revive a dead earth," and grass 
springs, and "tall leafy palm-trees with their date-clusters 
hanging round. Is not that a sign ? " Your cattle too ; — 
Allah made them ; serviceable dumb creatures ; they change 
the grass into milk ; you have your clothing from them, very 
strange creatures ; they come ranking home at evening time, 
"and," adds he, "and are a credit to you!" Ships also, — 
he talks often about ships : Huge moving mountains, they 
spread out their cloth wings, go bounding through the water 
there, Heaven's wind driving them ; anon they lie motion- 
less, God has withdrawn the wind, they lie dead, and cannot 



THE HERO AS PROPHET. ']'] 

stir! Miracles? cries he: What miracle would you have? 
Are not you yourselves there ? God made_y^//, " shaped you 
out of a little clay." Ye were small once ; a few years ago 
3'e were not at all. Ye have beauty, strength, thoughts, " ye 
have compassion on one another." Old age comes on you, 
and gray hairs ; your strength fades into feebleness ; ye sink 
down, and again are not. " Ye hav^e compassion on one 
another: " this struck me much : Allah might have made you 
having no compassion on one another, — how had it been 
then ! This is a great direct thought, a glance at first-hand 
into the very fact of things. Rude vestiges of poetic genius, 
of whatsoever is best and truest, are visible in this man. A 
strong untutored intellect; eyesight, heart: a strong wild 
man, — might have shaped himself into Poet, King, Priest, 
any kind of Hero. 

To his eyes it is forever clear that this world wholly is 
miraculous. He sees what, as we said once before, all great 
thinkers, the rude Scandinavians themselves, in one way or 
other, have contrived to see : That this so solid-looking 
material world is, at bottom, in very deed, Nothing; is a 
visual and tactual Manifestation of God's power and presence, 
— a shadow hung out by Him on the bosom of the void Infi- 
nite ; nothing more. The mountains, he says, these great rock- 
mountains, they shall dissipate themselves " hke clouds ; " 
melt into the Blue as clouds do, and not be ! He figures the 
Earth, in the Arab fashion. Sale tells us, as an immense 
Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are set on that 
to steady it. At the Last Day they shall disappear " like 
clouds ; " the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself off 
into wreck, and as dust and vapor vanish in the Inane. Allah 
withdraws his hand from it, and it ceases to be. The univer- 
sal empire of Allah, presence everywhere of an unspeakable 
Power, a Splendor^ and a Terror not to be named, as the 



'jS LECTURES ON HEROES. 

true force, essence and reality, in all things whatsoever, was 
continually clear to this man. What a modern talks of by 
the name. Forces of Nature, Laws of Nature ; and does not 
figure as a divine thing ; not even as one thing at all, but as 
a set of things, undivine enough, — salable, curious, good 
for propelling steamships ! With our Sciences and Cyclopre- 
dias, we are apt to forget the divinefiess, in those laboratories 
of ours. We ous^ht not to fors^et it ! That once well forgot- 
ten, I know not what else were worth remembering. Most 
sciences, I think, were then a very dead thing ; withered, 
contentious, empty; — a thistle in late autumn. The best 
science, without this, is but as the dead timber ; it is not the 
growing tree and forest, — which gives ever-new timber, 
among other things ! Man cannot know either, unless he 
worship in some way. His knowledge is a pedantry, and 
dead thistle, otherwise. 

Much has been said and.;written about the sensuality of 
Mahomet's Religion; more than was just. The indulgences, 
criminal to us, which he permitted, were not of his appoint- 
ment ; he found them practised, unquestioned, from immemo- 
rial time in Arabia ; what he did was to curtail them, restrict 
them, not on one but on many sides. His Religion is not an 
easy one : with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex for- 
mulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it 
did not " succeed by being an easy religion.'' As if indeed 
any rehgion, or cause holding of reHgion, could succeed by 
that ! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to 
heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, — sugar- 
plums of any kind, in this world or the next ! In the meanest 
mortal there lies something nobler. The poor swearing sol- 
dier, hired to be shot, has his "honor of a soldier," different 
from drill-regulations and the shilling a day. It is not to 
taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindi- 



THE HERO AS PR0PIIE7\ 79 

cate himself under God's Heaven as a God-made Man, that 
the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of 
doing that, the dullest daydrudge kindles into a hero. They 
wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. 
Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allureinetits 
that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial hfe 
of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considera- 
tions. Not happiness, but something higher : one sees this 
even in the frivolous classes, with their "point of honor" 
and the like. Not by flattering our appetites ; no, by awaken- 
ing the Heroic that slumbers in every heart, can any Religion 
gain followers. 

Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was 
not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this 
man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoy- 
ments, — nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was 
of the frugalest ; his common diet barley-bread and water : 
sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on 
his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend 
his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, 
ill-provided man ; careless of what vulgar men toil for. Not 
a bad man, I should say ; something better in him than hun- 
ger of any sort, — or these wild Arab men, fighting and jos- 
thng three and twenty years at his hand, in close contact with 
him always, would not have reverenced him so ! They were 
wild men, bursting ever and anon into quarrel, into all kinds 
of fierce sincerity ; without right worth and manhood, no man 
could have commanded them. They called him Prophet, 
you say ? Why, he stood there face to face with them ; bare, 
not enshrined in any mystery ; visibly clouting his own cloak, 
cobbling his own shoes ; fighting, counselHng, ordering in 
the midst of them : they must have seen what kind of a man 
he was^ let him be called what you like ! No emperor with 



80 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own 
clouting, during three and twenty years of rough actual 
trial. I find something of a veritable Hero necessary for 
that, of itself. 

His last words are a prayer; broken ejaculations of a heart 
struggling up, in trembling hope, towards its Maker. We 
cannot say that his religion made him worse ; it made him 
better; good, not bad. Generous things are recorded of 
him: when he lost his Daughter, the thing he answers is, in 
his own dialect, every way sincere, and yet equivalent to 
that of Christians, " The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh 
away; blessed be the name of the Lord." He answered in 
like manner of Seid, his emancipated well-beloved Slave, the 
second of the believers. Seid had fallen in the War of 
Tabuc, the first of Mahomet's fightings with the Greeks. 
Mahomet said, It was well ; Seid had done his Master's 
work, Seid had now gone to his Master : it was all well with 
Seid. Yet Seid's daughter found him weeping over the 
body; — the old gray-haired man melting in tears! "What 
do I see ? " said she. — " You see a friend weeping over his 
friend." — He wTnt out for the last time into tlie mosque, 
two days before his death ; asked, If he had injured any man 'i 
Let his own back bear the stripes. If he owed any man? 
A voice answered, " Yes, me three drachms," borrowed on 
such an occasion. Mahomet ordered them to be paid : 
" Better be in shame now," said he, " than at the Day of 
Judgment." — You remember Kadijah, and the " No, by 
Allah ! " Traits of that kind show us the genuine man, the 
brother of us all, brought visible through twelve centuries, 
■ — the veritable Son of our common Mother. 

Withal I like Mahomet for his total freedom from cant, 
fie is a rough self-helping son of the wilderness ; does not 
pretend to be what he is not, There is no ostentatious 



THE HERO AS PROPHET, 8 1 

pride in him ; but neither does he go much upon humiHty : 
he is there as he can be, in cloak and shoes of his own 
clouting ; speaks plainly to all manner of Persian Kings^ 
Greek Emperors, what it is they are bound to do ; knows 
well enough, about himself, " the respect due unto thee." 
In a life-and-death war with Bedouins, cruel things could not 
fail ; but neither are acts of mercy, of noble natural pity and 
generosity, wanting. Mahomet makes no apology for the 
one, no boast of the other. They were each the free dictate 
of his heart ; each called for, there and then. Not a mealy- 
mouthed man ! A candid ferocity, if the case call for it, is in 
him; he does not mince matters ! The War of Tabuc is a 
thing he often speaks of : his men refused, many of them, to 
march on that occasion ; pleaded the heat of the weather, 
the harvest, and so forth ; he can never forget that. Your 
harvest ? It lasts for a day. What will become of your 
harvest through all Eternity? Hot weather? Yes, it was 
hot; "but Hell will be hotter!" Sometimes a rough sar- 
casm turns up : He says to the unbelievers, Ye shall have 
the just measure of your deeds at that Great Day. They will 
be weighed out to you ; ye shall not have short weight ! — 
Everywhere he fixes the matter in his eye; he sees it: his 
heart, now and then, is as if struck dumb by the greatness of 
it. " Assuredly," he says : that word, in the Koran, is written 
down sometimes as a sentence by itself : " Assuredly." 

No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of 
Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity : 
e is in deadly earnest about it ! Dilettantism, hypothesis, 
speculation, a kind of amateur seach for Truth, toying and 
coquetting with Truth : this is the sorest sin. The root of 
all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul 
of the man never having been ope7i to Truth ; — "living in 
a vain show." Such a man not only utters and produces 



82 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational mora\ 
principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet 
paralysis of life-death. The very falsehoods of Mahomet 
are truer than the truths of such a man. He is the insin- 
cere man : smooth-polished, respectable in some times and 
places ; inoffensive, says nothing harsh to anybody ; most 
cleanly^ — just as carbonic acid is, which is death and 
poison. 

We will not praise Mahomet's moral precepts as always of 
the superfinest sort ; yet it can be said that there is always 
a tendency to good in them ; that they are the true dictates 
of a heart aiming towards what is just and true. The sublime 
forgiveness of Christianity, turning of the other cheek when 
the one has been smitten, is not here : you are to revenge 
yourself, but it is to be in measure, not overmuch, or beyond 
justice. On the other hand, Islam, like any great Faith, and 
insight into the essence of man, is a perfect equahzer of 
men : the soul of one believer outweighs all earthly king- 
ships ; all men, according to Islam too, are equal. Maho- 
met insists not on the propriety of giving alms, but on tlie 
necessity of it : he marks down by law how much you are to 
give, and it is at your peril if you neglect. The tenth part 
of a man's annual income, w^hatever that may be, is the 
property of the poor, of those that are afflicted and need 
help. Good all this : the natural voice of humanity, of pity 
and equity dwelling in the heart of this wild Son of Nature 
speaks so. 

Mahomet's Paradise is sensual, his Hell sensual : true ; 
in the one and the other there is enough that shocks all 
sprritual feeling in us. But we are to recollect that the 
Arabs already had it so ; that Mahomet, in whatever he 
changed of it, softened and diminished all thi€. The worst 
sensualities, too. are the work of doctors, followers af hi§^ 



THE HERO AS PROPHET. 83 

not his work. In the Koran there is really very little said 
about the joys of Paradise ; they are intimated rather than 
insisted on. Nor is it forgotten that the highest joys even 
there shall be spiritual : the pure Presence of the Highest, 
this shall infinitely transcend all other joys. He says, 
" Your salutation shall be, Peace." Sala7n, Have Peace ! — 
the thing that all rational souls long for, and seek, vainly 
here below, as the one blessing. " Ye shall sit on seats, 
facing one another : all grudges sliall be taken away out of 
your hearts." All grudges! Ye shall love one another 
freely ; for each of you, in the eyes of his brothers, there 
will be Heaven enough ! 

In reference to this of the sensual Paradise and jVIahomet's 
sensuality, the sorest chapter of all for us, there were many 
things to be said ; which it is not convenient to enter upon 
here. Two remarks only I shall make, and therewith leave 
it to your candor. The first is furnished me by Goethe; it is 
a casual hint of his which seems well wprth taking note of. 
In one of his Delineations, in Meister'^s Travels it is, the 
hero comes upon a Society of men with very strange ways, 
one of which was this: "We require," says the Master, 
"that each of our people shall restrict himself in one direc- 
tion," shall go right against his desire in one matter, and 
7nake himself do the thing he does not wish, "should we 
allow him the greater latitude on all other sides." There 
seems to me a great justness in this. Enjoying things which 
are pleasant ; that is not the evil : it is the reducing of our 
moral self to slavery by them that is. Let a man assert 
withal that he is king over his habitudes ; that he could and 
would shake them off, on cause shown : this is an excellent 
law. The Month Ramadhan for the Moslem, much in 
Mahomet's Religion, much in his own Life, bears in that 
direction ; if not by forethought, or clear purpose of moral 



84 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

improvement on his part, then by a certain healthy manful 
instinct, which is as good. 

But there is another thing to be said about the Mahometan 
Heaven and Hell. This namely, that, however gross and 
material they may be, they are an emblem of an everlasting 
truth, not always so well remembered elsewhere. That 
gross sensual Paradise of his ; that horrible flaming Hell ; 
the great enormous Day of Judgment he perpetually insists 
on : what is all this but a rude shadow, in the rude Bedouin 
imagination, of that grand spiritual Fact, and Beginning of 
Facts, which it is ill for us too if we do not all know and 
feel: the Infinite Nature of Duty.'* That man's actions here 
are of i7ifi7iite moment to him, and never die or end at all; 
that man, with his little life, reaches upwards high as 
Heaven, downwards low as Hell, and in his threescore years 
of Time holds an Eternity fearfully and wonderfully hidden : 
all this had burnt itself, as in flame-characters, into the wild 
Arab soul. As in flame and lightning, it stands written 
there ; awful, unspeakable, ever present to him. With burst- 
ing earnestness, with a fierce savage sincerity, half-articulat- 
ing, not able to articulate, he strives to speak it, bodies it 
forth in that Heaven and that Hell. Bodied forth in what 
way you will, it is the first of all truths. It is venerable 
under all embodiments. What is the chief end of man here 
below? Mahomet has answered this question, in a way that 
might put some of us to shame ! He does not, like a 
Bentham, a Paley, take Right and Wrong, and calculate the 
profit and loss, ultimate pleasure of the one and of tlie 
other; and summing all up by addition and subtraction 
into a net result, ask you, Whether on the whole the Right 
does not preponderate considerably ? No ; is it not better 
to do the one than the other ; the one is to the other as life 
is to deathj — as Heaven is to Hell. The one must in 



THE HERO AS PIWPHET. 85 

nowise be done, the other in nowise left undone. You shall 
not measure them ; they are incommensurable : the one is 
death eternal to a man, the other is life eternal. Benthamee 
Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this God's- 
world to a dead brute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial 
Soul of Man to a kind of Hay-balance for weighing hay 
and thistles on, pleasures and pains on : — If you ask me 
which gives, Mahomet or they, the beggarlier and falser view 
of Man and his Destinies in this Universe, I will answer, It 

is not Mahomet ! 

On the whole, we will repeat that this Rehgion of Maho- 
met's is a kind of Christianity ; has a genuine element of 
what is spiritually highest looking through it, not to be 
hidden by all its imperfections. The Scandinavian God 
Wish, the god of all rude men, — this has been enlarged 
into a Heaven by Mahomet ; but a Heaven symbolical of 
sacred Duty, and to be earned by faith and well-doing, by 
vahant action, and a divine patience which is still more 
valiant. It is Scandinavian Paganism, and a truly celestial 
element superadded to that. Call it not false ; look not at 
the falsehood of it, look at the truth of it. For these twelve 
centuries, it has been the religion and life-guidance of the 
fifth part of the whole kindred of Mankind. Above all 
things, it has been a religion heartily believed. These Arabs 
believe their religion, and try to live by it ! No Christians, 
since the early ages, or only perhaps the English Puritans 
in modern times, have ever stood by their Faith as the 
Moslem do by theirs, — believing it wholly, fronting Time 
with it, and Eternity with it. This night the watchman on 
the streets of Cairo when he cries, "Who goes.?" will hear 
from the passenger, along with his answer, " There is no 
God but God." Allah akbar, Islam, sounds through the 
souls, and whole daily existence, of these dusky millions. 



86 Lf:CTUkES OAr IIKROES. 

Zealous missionaries preach it abroad among Malays, black 
Papuans, brutal Idolaters ; — displacing what is worse, noth- 
ing that is better or good. 

To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into 
light: Arabia first became alive .by means of it. A poor 
shepherd people, roaming unnoticed in its deserts since the 
creation of the world: a Hero-Prophet was sent down to 
them with a word they could believe: see, the unnoticed 
becomes world-notable, the small has grown w^orld-great ; 
within one century afterwards, Arabia is at Grenada on this 
hand, at Delhi oil that ; — glancing in valor and splendor 
and the light of genius, Arabia shines through long ages 
over a great section of the world. Belief is great, life-giving. 
The history of a Nation becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, 
great, so soon as it believes. These Arabs, the man Maho- 
met, and that one century, — is it not as if a spark had 
fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black unnutice- 
able sand; but lo, the sand proves explosive powder, l^azes 
heaven-high from Delhi to Grenada ! I said, the Great Man 
was always as lightning out of Heaven ; the rest ol mea 
waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flamq 



^1 



THE HERO AS POET. 8/ 



LECTURE in, 
THE HERO AS POET. DANTE; SHAKSPEARE. 

\Titesday, 12th May, 1840.] 

THE Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are produc- 
tions of old ages ; not tO be repeated in the new. They 
presuppose a certain rudeness of conception, which the prog- 
ress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end to. There 
needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, of almost vacant, of 
scientific forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy 
their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with the voice 
of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past. We are now to 
see our Hero in the less ambitious, but also less questiona- 
ble, character of Poet; a character which does not pass. 
The Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages ; whom all 
ages possess, when once he is produced, whom the newest 
age as the oldest may produce ; — and will produce, always 
when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul ; in no 
age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a 
Poet. 

Hero, Prophet, Poet, — many different names, in different 
times and places, do we give to Great Men ; according to 
varieties we note in them, according to the sphere in which 
they have displayed themselves ! We might give many more 
names, on this same principle. I will remark again, however, 
as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that the different 



sphere constitutes the grand origin of such distinction ; that 
the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest, or what 30U 
will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born 
into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that 
could not be all sorts of men. The Poet who could merely 
sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a 
stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, 
unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. I fancy 
there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator, Phi- 
losopher ; — in one or the other degree, he could have been, 
he is, all these. So too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, 
with that great glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, 
with the bursting tears that were in it, could not have written 
verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts in that way, 
had his course of hfe and education led him thitherward. 
The grand fundamental character is that of Great Man ; 
that the man be great. Napoleon has words in him which 
are hke Austerlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth's Marshals are 
a kind of poetical men withal ; the things Turenne says 
are full of sagacity and geniality, like sayings of Samuel 
Johnson. The great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye : there 
it lies ; no man whatever, in what province soever, can 
prosper at all without these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did 
diplomatic messages, it seems, quite well : one can easily 
believe it; they had done things a little harder than these! 
Burns, a gifted song-writer, might have made a still better 
Mirabeau. Shakspeare, — one knows not what lie could not 
have made, in the supreme degree. 

True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not 
make all great men, more than all other men, in the selfsame 
mould. Varieties of aptitude doubtless ; but infinitely more 
of circumstance ; and far oftenest it is the /^//^r only that 
are looked to. But it is as with common men in the learning 



THE HERO AS POET. 89 

of trades. You take any man, as yet a vague capability of 
a man, who could be any kind of craftsman ; and make 
him into a smith, a carpenter, a mason : he is then and 
thenceforth that and nothing else. And if, as Addison com- 
plains, you sometimes see a street-porter staggering under 
his load on spindle-shanks, and near at hand a tailor with 
the frame of a Samson handling a bit of cloth and small 
Whitechapel needle, — it cannot be considered that aptitude 
of Nature alone has been consulted here either ! — The 
Great Man also, to what shall he be bound apprentice ? 
Given your Hero, is he to become Conquerer, King, Philoso- 
pher, Poet? It is an inexplicably complex controversial- 
calculation between the world and him ! He will read the 
world and its laws ; the world with its laws will be there to 
be read. What the world, on this matter, shall permit 
and bid is, as we said, the most important fact about the 
world. 



Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern 
notions of them. In some old languages, again, the titles 
are synonymous ; Vates means both Prophet and Poet : and 
indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well understood, have 
much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they are 
still the same ; in this most important respect especially, 
That they have penetrated both of them into the sacred 
mystery of the Universe ; what Goethe calls " the open 
secret." "Which is the great secret?" asks one. — "The 
open secret," — open to all, seen by almost none ! That 
divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, " the 
Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom of 
Appearance," as Fichte styles it ; of which all Appearance, 
from the starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially 
the Appearance of Man and his work, is but the vesture^ 



90 LECTURES OAT HEROES. 

the embodiment that renders it vi-sible. This divine mystery 
is in all times and in all places ; veritably is. In most times 
and places it is greatly overlooked ; and the Universe, defin- 
able always in one or the other dialect, as the realized 
Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace 
matter, — as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which 
some upholsterer had put together ! It could do no good, at 
present, to speak much about this ; but it is a pity for every 
one of us if we do not know it, live ever in the knowledge of 
it. Really a most mournful pity ; — a failure to live at all, 
if we live otherwise ! 

" But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, 
the Vates, whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; 
is a man sent hither to make it more impressively known to 
us. That always is his message ; he is to reveal that to us, 
— that sacred mystery which he more than others lives ever 
present with. While others forget it, he knows it; — I might 
say, he has been driven to know it ; without consent asked 
of him, he finds himself living in it, bound to live in it. 
Once more, here is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and 
Belief; this man too could not help being a sincere man! 
Whosoever may live in the shows of things, it is for him a 
necessity of nature to live in the very fact of things. A 
man once more, in earnest with the Universe, though all 
others were but toying with it. He is a Vates, first of all, in 
virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet, partici- 
pators in the " open secret," are one. 

With respect to their distinction again : the Vates Prophet, 
we might say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on 
the moral side, as Good and Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the 
Vates Poet on what the Germans call the aesthetic side, as 
Beautiful, and the like. The one we may call a .revealer of 
what we are to do, the other of what we are to love. But 



THE HERO AS POET. 9I 

indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot 
be disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye on what we are 
to love : how else shall he know what it is we are to do ? 
The highest Voice ever heard on this earth said withal, 
" Consider the hlies of the field ; they toil not, neither do 
they spin : yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed 
like one of these." A glance, that, into the deepest deep 
of Beauty. " The hlies of the field," — dressed finer than 
earthly princes, springing up there in the humble furrow field ; 
a beautiful eye looking out on you, from the great inner Sea 
of Beauty ! How could the rude Earth make these, if her 
Essence, rugged as she looks and is, were not inwardly 
Beauty ? In this point of view, too, a saying of Goethe's, 
which has staggered several, may have meaning : *' The 
Beautiful," he intimates, " is higher than the Good ; the 
Beautiful includes in it " the Good." The true Beautiful ; 
which however, I have said somewhere, "differs from the 
false as Heaven does from Vauxhall ! " So much for 
the distinction and identity of Poet and Prophet. 

In ancient and also in modern periods we find a few 
Poets who are accounted perfect ; whom it were a kind of 
treason to find fault with. This is noteworthy ; this is right : 
yet in strictness it is only an illusion. At bottom, clearly 
enough, there is no perfect Poet ! A vein of Poetry exists 
in the hearts of all men ; no man is made altogether of 
Poetry. We are all poets when we 7'ead a poem well. 
The " imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante," is 
not that the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's 
own? No one but Shakspeare can embody, out of Saxo 
Grammaticus, the story of Hamlet as Shakspeare did : but 
every one models some kind of story out of it ; every one 
embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in 
defining. Where there is no specific difference, as between 



92 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

round and square, all definition must be more or less arbitrary. 
A man that has so much more of the poetic element de- 
veloped in him as to have become noticeable, will be called 
Poet by his neighbors. World-Poets too, those whom we are 
to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics in the same 
way. One who rises so iar above the general level of Poets 
will, to such and such critics, seem a Universal Poet ; as he 
ought to do. And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary dis- 
tinction. All Poets, all men, have some touches of the 
Universal ; no man is wholly made of that. Most Poets are 
very soon forgotten : but not the noblest Shakspeare or 
Homer of them can be remembered /brever y — a day comes 
when he too is not ! 

Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a difference be- 
tween true Poetry and true Speech not poetical: what is the 
difference ? On this point many things have been written, 
especially by late German Critics, some of which are not 
very intelligible at first. They say, for example, that the 
Poet has an infinitude in him ; communicates an Unendlich- 
keit^ a certain character of "infinitude," to whatsoever he 
delineates. This, though not very precise, yet on so vague a 
matter is worth remembering: if well meditated, some mean- 
ing will gradually be found in it. For my own part, I find 
considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of Poetry 
being metj'ical, having music in it, being a Song. Truly, if 
pressed to give a definition, one might say this as soon as 
any thing else: If your delineation be authentically musical^ 
musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in all 
the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of 
it, then it will be poetical ; if not, not. — Musical : how much 
lies in that ! A jmisical ihoxxght is one spoken by a mind that 
has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing : detected 
the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden 



THE HERO AS POET. 93 

in it ; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, 
whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. 
All inmost things, we may say, are melodious ; naturally utter 
themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. 
Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect 
music has on us ? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable 
speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets 
us for moments gaze into that ! 

Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has some- 
thing of song in it : not a parish in the world but has its 
parish accent; — the rhythm or tune to which the people 
there sing what they have to say ! Accent is a kind of 
chanting ; all men have accent of their own, — though they 
only notice that of others. Observe too how all passionate 
language does of itself become musical, — with a finer 
music than the mere accent ; the speech of a man even in 
zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are 
Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, 
Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls ! The 
primal element of us ; of us, and of all things. The Greeks 
fabled of Sphere-Harmonies : it was the feehng they had of 
the inner structure of Nature ; that the soul of all her voices 
and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we 
will call 7nusical Thought. The Poet is he who thinks in 
that manner. At bottom, it turns still on power of intellect ; 
it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a 
Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically ; the heart 
of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it. 
The Vates Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse of Nature, 
seems to hold a poor rank among us, in comparison with the 
Vates Prophet ; his function, and our esteem of him for his 
function, alike shght. The Hero taken as Divinity ; the Hero 
taken as Prophet ; then next the Hero taken only as Poet : 



94 LECTURES' ON HEROES. 

does it not look as if our estimate of the Great Man, epoch 
after epoch, were continually diminishing? We take him 
first for a god, then for one god-inspired; and now in the 
next stage of it, his most miraculous word gains from us 
only the recognition that he is a Poet, beautiful verse-maker, 
man of genius, or suchlike ! — It looks so; but I persuade 
myself that intrinsically it is not so. If we consider well, it 
will perhaps appear that in man still there is the same alto- 
gether pecuhar admiration for the Heroic Gift, by what name 
soever called, that there at any time was. 

nI should say, if we do not now reckon a Great Man liter- 
ally divine, it is that our notions of God, of the supreme 
unattainable Fountain of Splendor, Wisdom and Heroism, 
are ever rising higher j not altogether that our reverence for 
these qualities, as manifested in our like, is getting lower. 
This is worth taking thought of. Sceptical Dilettantism, the 
curse of these ages, a curse which will not last forever, does 
indeed in this the highest province of human things, as in 
all provinces, make sad work ; and our reverence for great 
men, all crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is, comes out in 
poor plight, hardl}^ recognizable. Men worship the shows of 
great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality 
of great men to worship. The dreariest, fatalest faith ; be- 
lieving which, one would hterally despair of human things. 
Nevertheless look, for example, at Napoleon I A Corsican 
lieutenant of artillery ; that is the show of hitn : yet is he 
not obeyed, worshipped -Ai^x his sort, as all the Tiaraed and 
Diademed of the world put together could not be ? High 
Duchesses, and hostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish 
rustic, Burns; — a strange feeling dwelling in each that 
they never heard a man Hke this ; that, on the whole, this is 
the man ! In the secret heart of these people it still dimly 
reveals itself, though there is no accredited way of uttering it 



THE HERO AS POET. 95 

at present, that this rustic, with his black brows and flashing 
sun-eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears, is of 
a dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable with all 
others. Do not we feel it so ? But now, were Dilettantism, 
Scepticism, Triviality, and all that sorrowful brood, cast out 
^1 us, — as, by God's blessing, they shall one day be; were 
faith in the shows of things entirely swept out, replaced by 
clear faith in the things^ so that a man acted on the impulse 
of that only, and counted the other non-extant : what a new 
livelier feeling towards this Burns were it ! 

Nay here in these ages, such as they are, have we not two 
mere Poets, if not deified, yet we may say beatified ? Shak- 
speare and Dante are Saints of Poetry; really, if we will 
think of it, canonized, so that it is impiety to meddle with 
them. The unguided instinct of the world, working across 
all these perverse impediments, has arrived at such result. 
Dante and Shakspeare are a peculiar Two. They dwell 
apart, in a kind of royal solitude ; none equal, none second 
to them : in the general feehng of the world, a certain tran- 
scendentalism, a glory as of complete perfection, invests 
these two. They are canonized, though no Pope or Cardinals 
took hand in doing it ! Such, in spite of every perverting 
influence, in the most unheroic times, is still our indestruc- 
tible reverence for heroism. — We will look a little at these 
Two, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakspeare : what little 
it is permitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet will most 
fitly arrange itself in that fashion. 

Many volumes have been written by way of commentary 
on Dante and his Book ; yet, on the whole, with no great 
result. His Biography is, as it were, irrecoverably lost for 
us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrow-stricken man, not 
jnuch note was taken of him while he lived ; and the most 



96 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

of that has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes. 
It is five centuries since he ceased writing and Hving here. 
After all commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we 
know of him. The Book ; — and one might add that Por- 
trait commonly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, 
you cannot help inclining to think genuine, whoever did it. 
To me it is a most touching face ; perhaps of all faces that 
I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, 
with the simple laurel wound round it ; the deathless sorrow 
and pain, the known victory which is also deathless ; — sig- 
nificant of the whole history of Dante ! I think it is the 
mournfulest face that ever was painted from reality ; an 
altogether tragic, heart-affecting face. There is in it, as 
foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection, as 
of a child ; but all this is as if congealed into sharp contra- 
diction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain. A 
soft ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable, grim- 
trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice ! Withal 
it is a silent pain too, a silent scornful one : the lip is curled 
in a kind of godlike disdain of the thing that is eating out 
his heart, — as if it were withal a mean insignificant thing, 
as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle were 
greater than it. The face of one w^holly in protest, and life- 
long unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection 
all converted into indignation: an implacable indignation; 
slow, equable, silent, like that of a god ! The eye too, it 
looks out as in a kind of surprise^ a kind of inquiry. Why 
the world was of such a sort ? This is Dante : so he looks, 
this "voice of ten silent centuries," and sings us "his mystic 
unfathomable sons^." 

The little that we know of Dante's Life corresponds well 
enough with this Portrait and this Book. He was born at 
Florence, in the upper class of society, in the year 1265. Hi§ 




^,>v- ^ "v - , . 



A MOSr TOUCHING ¥ACE.'''—Paffe 96. 



THE HERO AS POET. 97 

education was the best then going; much school-divinity, 
Aristotelean logic, some Latin classics, — no inconsiderable 
insight into certain provinces of things: and Dante, with his 
earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt, learned better 
than most all that was learnable. He has a clear cultivated 
understanding, and of great subtlety; this best fruit of edu- 
cation he had contrived to realize from these scholastics. 
He knows accurately and well what hes close to him ; but, 
in such a time, without printed books or free intercourse, he 
could not know well what was distant: the small clear light, 
most luminous for what is near, breaks itself into singular 
chiarosai?-o striking on what is far off. This was Dante's 
learning from the schools. In life, he had gone through the 
usual destinies ; been twice out campaigning as a soldier for 
the Florentine State, been on embassy ; had in his thirty- 
fifth year, by natural gradation of talent and service, become 
one of the Chief Magistrates of Florence. He had met in 
boyhood a certain Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl of 
his own age and rank, and grown up thenceforth in partial 
sight of her, in some distant intercourse with her. All read- 
ers know his graceful affecting account of this ; and then 
of their being parted ; of her being wedded to another, and of 
her death soon after. She makes a great figure in Dante's 
Poem ; seems to have made a great figure in his life. Of all 
beings it might seem as if she, held apart from him, far apart 
at last in the dim Eternity, were the only one he had ever 
with his whole strens^th of affection loved. She died : Dante 
himself was wedded; but it seems not happily, far from 
happily. I fancy, the rigorous earnest man, with his keen 
excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make happy. 

We will not complain of Dante's miseries : had all gone 
right with him as he wished it, he might have been Prior, 
Podestk, or whatsoever they call it, of Florence, well accepted 



98 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

among neighbors, — and the world had wanted one oi the 
most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence would 
have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb 
centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening 
centuries (for there will be ten of them and more) had no 
Diviiia Covnnedia to hear! We will complain of nothing. 
A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and he, 
struggling like a man led towards death and crucifixion, could 
not help fulfilhng it. Give hiin the choice of his happiness ! 
He knew not, more than we do, what was really happy, what 
was really miserable. 

In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, 
or some other confused disturbances rose to such a height, 
that Dante, whose party had seemed the stronger, was with 
his friends cast unexpectedly forth into banishment; doomed 
thenceforth to a life of woe and wandering. His property 
was all confiscated and more ; he had the fiercest feeling that 
it was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight of God and man. 
He tried what was in him to get reinstated; tried even by 
warlike surprisal, with arms in his hand ; but it would not 
do ; bad only had become worse. There is a record, I be- 
lieve, still extant in the Florence Archives, dooming this 
Dante, wheresoever caught, to be burnt alive. Burnt alive ; 
so it stands, they say : a very curious civic document. An- 
other curious document, some considerable number of years 
later, is a Letter of Dante's to the Florentine Magistrates, 
written in answer to a milder proposal of theirs, that he 
should return on condition of apologizing and paying a fine, 
fie answers, with fixed stern pride : "If I cannot return 
^vithout calling myself guilty, I will never return, niinquatn 
Y ever tar.''' 

For Dante there was now no home in this world. He 
^vandere^i from patron to patron, from place to place ; proving, 



THE HERO AS POET. 99 

in his own bitter words, " How hard is the path, Co7ne e duro 
calle.'''' The wretched are not cheerful company. Dante, 
poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, with his 
moody humors, was not a man to concihate men. Petrarch 
reports of him that being at Can della Scala's court, and 
blamed one day for his gloom and taciturnity, he answered in 
no courtier-like way. Della Scala stood among his courtiers, 
with mimes and buffoons {nebulones ac Jiistriones) making 
him heartily merry; when turning to Dante, he said: "Is 
it not strange, now, that this poor fool should make him- 
self so entertaining; while you, a wise man, sit there day 
after day, and have nothing to amuse us with at all ? " Dante 
answered bitterly : " No, not strange ; your Highness is to 
recollect the Proverb, Z/-^^ to Like;'''' — given the amuser, 
the amusee must also be given ! Such a man, with his proud 
silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was not made to 
succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be evident to him 
that he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit, 
in this earth. The earthly world had cast him forth, to wan- 
der, wander; no living heart to love him now; for his sore 
miseries there was no solace here. 

The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress 
itself on' him; that awful reality over which, after all, this 
Time-world, with its Florences and banishments, only flutters 
as an unreal shadow. Florence thou shalt never see : but 
Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt surely see ! 
What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life 
altogether.? Eternity: thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, 
art thou and all things bound ! The great soul of Dante, 
homeless on earth, made its home more and more in that 
awful other world. Naturally his thoughts brooded on that, 
as on the one fact important for him. Bodied or bodiless, it 
is the one fact important for all ra^n ; — byt to Dante, in that 



lOO LECTURES ON HEROES. 

age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape : he no 
more doubted of that Malebolge Pool, that it all lay there 
with its gloomy circles, with its alti gtiai^ and that he himself 
should see it, than we doubt that we should see Constanti- 
nople if we went thither, Dante's heart, long filled with this, 
brooding over it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth 
at length into "mystic unfathomable song;" and this his 
Divine Comedy, the most remarkable of all modern Books, 
is the result. 

Tt must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, 
as we can see, a proud thought for him at times, That he, 
here in exile, could do this work ; that no F'lorence, nor no 
man or men, could hinder him from doing it, or even much 
help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that it was great ; 
the greatest a man could do. " If thou follow thy star, Se tu 
segui ttia stella^'' — so could the Hero, in his forsakenness, 
in his extreme need, still say to himself : " Follow thou thy 
star, thou shalt not fail of a glorious haven ! " The labor of 
writing, we find, and indeed could know otherwise, was great 
and painful for him ; he says, This Book, "which has made 
me lean for many years." Ah yes, it was won, all of it, with 
pain and sore toil, — not in sport, but in grim earnest. His 
Book, as indeed most good Books are, has been written, in 
many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his whole history, 
this Book. He died after finishing it; not yet very old, at 
the age of fifty-six; broken-hearted rather, as is said. He 
lies buried in his death-city Ravenna : Hie claudor Dantes 
patriis extorris ab oris. The Florentines begged back his 
body, in a century after ; the Ravenna people would not give 
it. " Here am I Dante laid, shut out from my native 
shores." 

I said, Dante's poem was a song : It is Tieck who calls it 
" a mystic unfathomable Song ; " and such is literally the 



THE HERO AS POET. lOI 

chafacter of it. Coleridge remarks very pertinently some- 
where, that wherever you find a sentence musically worded, 
of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something 
deep and good in the meaning too. For body and soul, 
word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. 
Song: we said before, it was the Heroic of Speech ! All old 
Poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically Songs. I 
would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are ; that what- 
soever is not stcng is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose 
cramped into jingling lines, — to the great injury of the 
grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part ! 
What we want to get at is the thought the man had, if he had 
any : why should he twist it into jingle, if he could speak it 
out plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into 
true passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according 
to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, 
depth and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right 
to rhyme and sing ; that we call him a Poet, and listen to him 
as the Heroic of Speakers, — whose speech is Song. Pre- 
tenders to this are many ; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, 
it is for most part a very melancholy, not to say an insup- 
portable business, that of reading rhyme ! Rhyme that had 
no inward necessity to be rhymed; — it ought to have told us 
plainly, without any jingle, what it was aiming at. I would 
advise all men who can speak their thought, not to sing it ; 
to understand that, in a serious time, among serious men, 
there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as 
we love the true song, and are charmed by it as by some- 
thing divine, so shall we hate the false song, and account it a 
mere wooden noise, a thing hollow, superfluous, altogether 
an insincere and offensive thing. 

I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his Divine 
Comedy that it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the 



102 tnCTVRES ON HEROES. 

very sound of it there is a canto ferino ; it proceeds as by a 
chant. The language, his simple terza rima, doubtless 
helped him in this. One reads along naturally with a sort 
of ////. But I add, that it could not be otherwise ; for the 
essence and material of the work are themselves rhythmic. 
Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, make it musical ; 
— go deep enough, there is music everywhere. A true in- 
ward symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, 
reigns in it, proportionates it all : architectural ; which also 
partakes of the character of music. The three kingdoms. 
Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradise, look out on one another like 
compartments of a great edifice ; a great supernatural world- 
cathedral, piled up there, stern, solemn, awful ; Dante's 
World of Souls ! It is, at bottom, the sincerest oi all Poems ; 
sincerity, here too, we find to be the measure of worth. It 
came deep out of the author's heart of hearts ; and it goes 
deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people 
of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, 
'■'■ Eccovi /' zio?n cJi' e stato alV Inferno, See, there is the man 
that was in Hell ! " Ah yes, he had been in Hell ; — in Hell 
enough, in long severe sorrow and struggle ; as the like of 
him is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come out 
divine 2iYt not accomplished otherwise. Thought, true labor 
of any kind, highest virtue itself^ is it not the daughter of 
Pain ? Born as out of the black whirlwind ; — true effort, in 
fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is 
Thought. In all ways we are " to become perfect through 
suffering^ — But, as I say, no work known to me is so 
elaborated as this of Dante's. It has all been as if molten, 
in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made him " lean " 
for many years. Not the general whole only ; every com- 
partment of it is worked out, with intense earnestness, into 
truth, into clear visuality. Each answers to the other ; each 



THE HERO AS POET. IO3 

fits in its place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and 
polished. It is the soul of Dante, and in this the soul of 
the Middle Ages, rendered forever rhythmically visible there. 
No light task; a right intense one : but a task which is done. 
Perhaps one would say, inte?Lsity, with the much that de- 
pends on it, is the prevailing character of Dante's genius. 
Dante does not come before us as a large catholic mind ; 
rather as a narrow, and even sectarian mind : it is partly 
the fruit of his age and position, but partly too of his own 
nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentred into 
fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great not because he 
is world-wide, but because he is world-deep. Through all 
objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. 
I know nothing so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, 
to begin with the outermost development of his intensity, 
consider how^ he paints. He has a great power of vision ; 
seizes the very type of a thing; presents that and nothing 
more. You remember that first view he gets of the Hall of 
Dite : red pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glowing through 
the dim immensity of gloom ; — so vivid, so distinct, visible 
at once and forever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius 
of Dante. There is a brevity, an abrupt precision in him : 
Tacitus is not briefer, more condensed ; and then in Dante 
it seems a natural condensation, spontaneous to the man. 
One smiting word ; and then there is silence, nothing more 
said. His silence is more eloquent than words. It is strange 
with what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the true like- 
ness of a matter : cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. 
Plutus, the blustering giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke ; it 
is "as the sails sink, the mast being suddenly broken." Or 
that poor Brunetto Latini, with the cotto aspetto^ " face 
baked,'"' parched brown and lean; and the "fiery snow" 
that falls on them there, a " fiery snow without wind," slow, 



104 LECTURES OJV HE ROMS. 

deliberate, never-ending ! Or the lids of those Tombs ; 
square sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each 
with its Soul in torment; the lids laid open there ; they are 
to be shut at the Day of Judgment, through Eternity. And 
how Farinata rises ; and how Cavalcante falls — at hearing 
of his Son, and the past tense " fue " ! The very movements 
in Dante have something brief ; swift, decisive, almost mili- 
tary. It is of the inmost essence of his genius this sort of 
painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so 
silent passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its 
silent, "pale rages," speaks itself in these things. 

For though this of painting is one of the outermost de- 
velopments of a man, it comes like all else from the essential 
faculty of him; it is physiognomical of the whole man. 
Find a man whose words paint you a likeness, you have 
found a man worth something ; mark his manner of doing 
it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could 
not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of 
it, unless he had, what we may call, sympathized W\\h it, — 
had sympathy in him to bestow on objects. He must have 
been sincere about it too ; sincere and sympathetic : a man 
without worth cannot give you the likeness of any object ; 
he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, 
about all objects. And indeed may we not say that intellect 
altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning what 
an object is 1 Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may 
have will come out here. Is it even of business, a matter to 
be done ? The gifted man is he who sees the essential 
point, and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage : it is his 
faculty too, the man of business's faculty, that he discern 
the true likeness^ not the false superficial one, of the thing 
he has got to work in. And how much of morality is in 
the kind of insight we get of any thing; "the eye seeing 



THE HERO AS POET. 105 

in all things what it brought with it the faculty of seeing"! 
To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the 
jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the Painters tell us, is 
the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No most gifted eye 
can exhaust the significance of any object. In the com- 
monest human face there lies more than Raphael will take 
away with him. 

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a 
vividness as of fire in dark night ; taken on the wider scale, 
it is every way noble, and the outcome of a great soul. 
Francesca and her Lover, what qualities in that ! A thing 
woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of, eternal black. A 
small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into our very 
heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too : della 
bella persona, che mi fii tolta ; and how, even in the Pit of 
woe, it is a solace that he will never part from her ! Saddest 
tragedy in these alti guai. And the racking winds, in that 
aer bruno, whirl them away again, to wail forever ! — Strange 
to think: Dante was the friend of this poor Francesca's 
father ; Francesca herself may have sat upon the Poet's knee, 
as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet also infinite 
rigor of law : it is so Nature is made ; it is so Dante dis- 
cerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of 
his Divine Comedos being a poor splenetic impotent terres- 
trial libel; putting those into Hell whom he could not be 
avenged upon on earth ! I suppose if ever pity, tender as 
a mother's, was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. 
But a man who does not know rigor cannot pity either. His 
very pity will be cowardly, egoistic, — sentimentality, or little 
better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that 
of Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying 
love : like the wail of yEolean harps, soft, soft; like a child's 
young heart; — and then that stern, sore-saddened heart! 



io6 LECTUkEs On heroes. 

These longings of his towards his Beatrice ; their meeting 
together in the Paradiso ; his gazing in her pure trans- 
figured eyes, her that had been purified by death so long, 
separated from him so far: — one likens it to the song of 
angels ; it is among the purest utterances of affection, 
perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human 
soul. 

For the intense Dante is intense in all things ; he has got 
into the essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, 
on occasion too as reasoner, is but the result of all other 
sorts of intensity. Morally great, above all, we must call 
him ; it is the beginning of all. His scorn, his grief, are as 
transcendent as his love; — as indeed, what are they but the 
inverse or converse of his love ? " -<4 Dio spiacenti ed d' 
neinici sui, Hateful to God and to the enemies of God : " lofty 
scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion ; " Non 
ragionam di lor, We will not speak of them, look only and 
pass." Or think of this ; " They have not the hope to die, 
Non han speranza di morte^ One day, it had risen sternly 
benign on the scathed heart of Dante, that he, wretched, 
never-resting, worn as he was, would full surely die; "that 
Destiny itself could not doom him not to die." Such words 
are in this man. For rigor, earnestness and depth, he is not 
to be paralleled in the modern world ; to seek his parallel we 
must go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique 
Prophets there. 

I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly pre- 
ferring the Inferno to the two other parts of the Divine 
Commedia. Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our 
general Byronism of taste, and is like to be a transient feel- 
ing. The Purgatorio and Paradiso, especially the former, 
one would almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is 
a noble thing that Purgatorio, " Mountain of Purification ; " 



THE HERO AS POET. lO^ 

an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If Sin 
is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet 
in Repentance too is man purified ; Repentance is the grand 
Christian act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The 
tremolar delV o?tde, that " trembling " of the ocean-waves, 
under the first pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on the 
wandering Two, is as the type of an altered mood. Hope 
has now dawned ; never-dying Hope, if in company still 
with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of demons and 
reprobate is underfoot ; a soft breathing of penitence mounts 
higher and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. " Pray 
for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to him. 
"Tell my Giovanna to pray for me," my daughter Giovanna; 
" I think her mother loves me no more ! " They toil pain- 
fully up by that winding steep, " bent down like corbels of a 
building," some of them, — crushed together so "for the 
sin of pride ; " yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons, 
they shall have reached the top, which is Heaven's gate, 
and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of 
all, when one has prevailed ; the whole Mountain shakes 
with joy, and a psalm of praise rises, when one soul has 
perfected repentance and got its sin and misery left be- 
hind ! I call all this a noble embodiment of a true noble 
thought. 

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one 
another, are indispensable to one another. The Paradiso, a 
kind of inarticulate music to me, is the redeeming side of the 
Inferno ; the Inferno without it were untrue. All three make 
up the true Unseen World, as figured in the Christianity of 
the Middle Ages ; a thing forever memorable, forever true 
in the essence of it, to all men. It was perhaps delineated in 
no human soul with such depth of veracity as in this of 
Dante's ; a man sent to sing it, to keep it long memorable. 



io8 Lectures om heroes. 

Very notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of 
the every-day reality, into the Invisible one; and in the 
second or third stanza, we find ourselves in the World of 
Spirits ; and dwell there, as among things palpable, indubita- 
ble ! To Dante they were so ; the real world, as it is 
called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely 
higher Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as 
pretervL2X\\x2X as the other. Has not each man a soul ? He 
will not only be a spirit, but is one. To the earnest Dante 
it is all one visible Fact; he beheves it, sees it; is the Poet 
of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say again, is the saving 
merit, now as always. 

Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an 
emblematic representation of his Belief about this Uni- 
verse : — some Critic in a future age, like those Scandinavian 
ones the other day, who has ceased altogether to think as 
Dante did, may find this too all an " Allegory," perhaps an 
idle Allegory ! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, 
of the soul of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge world- 
wide architectural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt 
Good and Evil to be the two polar elements of this Creation, 
on which it all turns ; that these two differ not by pre- 
ferability of one to the other, but by incompatibihty absolute 
and infinite ; that the one is excellent and high as light and 
Heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehenna and the Pit 
of Hell ! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence, with 
everlasting Pity, — all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle 
Ages had it, is emblemed here. Emblemed : and yet, as I 
urged the other day, with what entire truth of purpose ; 
how unconscious of any embleming ! Hell, Purgatory, Para- 
dise : these things were not fashioned as emblems ; was 
there, in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all 
of their being emblems ? Were they not indubitable awful 



THE HERO AS POET. IO9 

facts ; the whole heart of man taking them for practically 
true, all Nature everywhere confirming them ? So is it 
always in these things. Men do not believe an Allegory. 
The future Critic, whatever his new thought may be, who 
considers this of Dante to have been all got up as an 
Allegory, will commit one sore mistake ! — Paganism we 
recognized as a veracious expression of the earnest awe- 
struck feeling of man toward the Universe ; veracious, true 
once, and still not without worth for us. But mark here the 
difference of Paganism and Christianism ; one great dif- 
ference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of 
Nature ; the destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes, 
of things and men in this world ; Christianism emblemed 
the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was 
for the sensuous nature : a rude helpless utterance of the 
first Thought of men, — the chief recognized virtue, Cour- 
age, Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the 
sensuous nature, but for the moral. What a progress is 
here, if in that one respect only ! — 

And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, 
in a very strange way, found a voice. The Divina Conunedia 
is of Dante's writing; yet in truth // belongs to ten Christian 
centuries, only the finishing of it is Dante's. So always. 
The craftsman there, the smith with that metal of his, with 
these tools, with these cunning methods, — how little of all 
he does is properly his work ! All past inventive men work 
there with him; — as indeed with all of us, in all things. 
Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the Thought 
they lived by stands here, in everlasting music. These 
sublime ideas of his, terrible and beautiful, are the fruit of 
the Christian Meditation of all the good men who had gone 
before him. Precious they ; but also is not he precious ? 



no LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Much, had not he spoken, would have been dumb ; not dead, 
yet hving voiceless. 

On the whole, is it not an utterance, this mystic Song, at 
once of one of the greatest human souls, and of the highest 
thing that Europe had hitherto realized for itself? Chris- 
tianism, as Dante sings it, is another than Paganism in the 
rude Norse mind ; another than " Bastard Christianism " 
half-articulately spoken in the Arab Desert seven hundred 
>v3^rs before ! — The noblest idea made real hitherto among 
men, is sung, and emblemed forth abidingly, by one of the 
noblest men. In the one sense and in the other, are we not 
right glad to possess it 'i As I calculate, it may last yet for 
long thousands of years. For the thing that is uttered from 
the inmost parts of a man's soul, differs altogether from what 
is uttered by the outer part. The outer is of the day, under 
the empire of mode ; the outer passes away, in swift endless 
changes ; the inmost is the same yesterday, to-day and for- 
ever. True souls, in all generations of the world, who look 
on this Dante, will find a brotherhood in him ; the deep sin- 
cerity of his thoughts, his woes and hopes, will speak hke- 
wise to their sincerity ; they will feel that this Dante too was 
a brother. Napoleon in Saint-Helena is charmed with the 
genial veracity of old Homer. The oldest Hebrew Prophet, 
under a vesture the most diverse from ours, does yet, because 
he speaks from the heart of man, speak to all men's hearts. 
It is the one sole secret of continuing long memorable. 
Dante, for depth of sincerity, is like an antique Prophet too ; 
his words, like theirs, come from his very heart. One need 
not wonder if it were predicted that his Poem might be the 
most enduring thing our Europe has yet made ; for nothing 
so endures as a truly spoken word. All cathedrals, pontifi- 
calities, brass and stone, and outer arrangement never so 
Jasting, are brief in comparison to an unfathomable heart^^ 



THE HERO AS POET. Ill 

song like this: one feels as if it might survive, still of im- 
portance to men, when these had all sunk into new irrecog- 
nizable combinations, and had ceased individually to be. 
Europe has made much; great cities, great empires, ency- 
clopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion and practice : but it has 
made little of the class of Dante's Thought. Homer yet is, 
veritably present face to face with every open soul of us ; and 
Greece, where is//.? Desolate for thousands of years ; away, 
vanished; a bewildered heap of stones and rubbish, the life 
and existence of it all gone. Like a dream; like the dust 
of King Agamemnon ! Greece was ; Greece, except in the 
words it spoke, is not. 

The uses of this Dante ? We will not say much about his 
"uses." A human soul who has once got into that primal 
element of Song, and sung forth fitly somewhat therefrom, 
has worked in the depths of our existence ; feeding through 
long times the Wi^-roots of all excellent human thing-s what- 
soever, — in a way that "utiHties " will not succeed well in 
calculating ! We will not estimate the Sun by the quantity 
of gas-light it saves us ; Dante shall be invaluable, or of no 
value. One remark I may make : the contrast in this respect 
between the Hero-Poet and the Hero-Prophet, In a hun- 
dred years, Mahomet, as we saw, had his Arabians at Gre- 
nada and at Delhi ; Dante's Italians seem to be yet very much 
where they were. Shall we say, then, Dante's effect on the 
world was small in comparison ? Not so : his arena is far 
more restricted; but also it is far nobler, clearer ; —perhaps 
not less but more important. Mahomet speaks to great 
masses of men, in the coarse dialect adapted to such ; a 
dialect filled with inconsistencies, crudities, follies : on the 
great masses alone can he act, and there with good and with 
evil strangely blended. Dante speaks to the noble, the pure 
and great, in all times and places, Neither does he grow 



1 1 2 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

obsolete, as the other does. Dante burns as a pure star, 
fixed there in the firmament, at which the great and the high 
of all ages kindle themselves : he is the possession of all the 
chosen of the world for uncounted time. Dante, one calcu- 
lates, may long survive Mahomet. In this way the balance 
may be made straight again. 

But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on 
the world by what we can judge of their effect there, that a 
man and his work are measured. Effect? Influence? Util- 
ity ? Let a man do his work ; the fruit of it is the care of 
Another than he. It will grow its own fruit; and whether 
embodied in Caliph Thrones and Arabian Conquests, so 
that it " fills all Morning and Evening Newspapers," and all 
Histories, which are a kind of distilled Newspapers ; or not 
embodied so at all; — what matters that? That is not the 
real fruit of it ! The Arabian Caliph, in so far only as he did 
something, was something. If the great Cause of Man, and 
Man's work in God's Earth, got no furtherance from the 
Arabian Caliph, then no matter how many cimeters he drew, 
how many gold piasters pocketed, and what uproar and blar- 
ing he made in this world, — he was but a loud-sounding 
inanity and futility; at bottom, he was not at all. Let us 
honor the great empire of Silence^ once more ! The bound- 
less treasury which we do ;/^/ jingle in our pockets, or "count 
up and present before men ! It is perhaps, of all things, the 
usefulest for each of us to do, in these loud times. 

As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to 
embody musically the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Reli-' 
gion of our Modern Europe, its Inner Life ; so Shakspeare, 
we may say, embodies for us the Outer Life of our Europe 
as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies, humors, ambi- 
tions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at the. 




BORM AS OUT OF THE BLACK WH-lRLWlND ; —TRUE EFFORT, IN FACT, AS OF A 
CAPTIVE STRUGGLING TO FREE HIMSELF : THAT IS THOUGHT .''—Fape I02. 



THE HERO AS POET. II3 

world, men then had. As in Homer we may still construe 
Old Greece ; so in Shakspeare and Dante, after thousands of 
years, what our modern Europe was, in Faith and in Prac- 
tice, will still be legible. Dante has given us the Faith or 
soul ; Shakspeare, in a not less noble way, has given us the 
Practice or body. This latter also we were to have ; a man 
was sent for it, the man Shakspeare. Just when that chiv- 
alry way of life had reached its last finish, and was on the 
point of breaking down into slow or swift dissolution, as we 
now see it everywhere, this other sovereign Poet, with his 
seeing eye, with his perennial singing voice, was sent to take 
note of it, to give long-enduring record of it. Two fit men: 
Dante, deep, fierce as the central fire of the world; Shak- 
speare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as the Sun, the upper light of 
the world. Italy produced the one world-voice ; we English 
had the honor of producing the other. 

Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man 
came to us. I think always, so great, quiet, complete and 
self-sufiicing is this Shakspeare, had the Warwickshire Squire 
not prosecuted him for deer-steahng, we had perhaps never 
heard of him as a Poet ! The woods and skies, the rustic 
Life of Man in Stratford there, had been enough for this 
man ! But indeed that strange outbudding of our whole 
English Existence, which we call the Elizabethan Era, did 
not it too come as of its own accord .'' The "Tree Igdrasil " 
buds and withers by its own laws^ — too deep for our scan- 
ning. Yet it does bud and wither, and every bough and leaf 
of it is there, by fixed eternal laws ; not a Sir Thomas Lucy 
but comes at the hour fit for him. Curious, I say, and not 
sufiiciently considered : how every thing does co-operate with 
all ; not a leaf rotting on the highway but is indissoluble 
portion of solar and stellar systems ; no thought, word or act 
of m^n but has sprung withal out of all men, and works 



114 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

sooner or later, recognizably or irrecognizably, on all men .' 
It is all a Tree : circulation of sap and influences, mutual 
communication of every minutest leaf with the lowest talon 
of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portion of 
the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the 
Kingdoms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread 
the highest Heaven ! — 

In some sense it may be said that this glorious Elizabethan 
Era with its Shakspeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all 
which had preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism 
of the Middle Ages. The Christian Faith, which was the 
theme of Dante's Song, had produced this Practical Life 
which Shakspeare was to sing. For Religion then, as it 
now and always is, was the soul of Practice ; the primary 
vital fact in men's life. And remark here, as rather curi- 
ous, that Middle-Age Catholicism was abolished, so far as 
Acts of Parliament could abolish it, before Shakspeare, the 
noblest product of it, made his appearance. He did make 
his appearance nevertheless. Nature at her own time, with 
Catholici,3m or what else might be necessary, sent him forth; 
taking small thought of Acts of Parliament. King-Henrys, 
Oueen-Eltzabeths, go their way ; and Nature too goes hers. 
Acts of Parliament, on the whole, are'small, notwithstanding 
the noise they make. What Act of Parliament, debate at St. 
Stephen's, on the hustings or elsewhere, was it that brought 
this Shakspeare into being? No dining at Freemasons' 
Tavern, opening subscription-lists, selling of- shares, and 
infinite other jangling and true or false endeavoring ! This 
Ehzabethan Era, and all its nobleness and blessedness, 
came without proclamation, preparation, of ours. Price- 
less Shakspeare was the free gift of Nature ; given alto- 
gether silently; — received altogether silently, as if it had 
been a thing of little account. And yet, very literally, it 



THE HERO AS POET. II5 

is a priceless thing. One should look at that side of 
matters too. 

"^ Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one some- 
times hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right 
one ; I think the best judgment not of this country only, but 
of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, That 
Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto ; the greatest 
intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of him- 
self in the way of Literature. On the whole, I know not 
such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take 
all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness 
of depth ; placid joyous strength ; all things imaged in that 
great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathom- 
able sea ! It has been said, that in the constructing of Shak- 
speare's Dramas there is, apart from all other "faculties " as 
they are called, an understanding manifested, equal to that 
in Bacon's Novum Orgamnn. That is true ; and it is not a 
truth that strikes every one. It would become more appar- 

* ent if we tried, any of us for himself, how, out of Shakspeare's 
dramatic materials, we could fashion such a result ! The 
built house seems all so fit, — every way as it should be, as 
if it came there by its own law and the nature of things, — 
we forget the rude disorderly quarry it was shaped from. 
The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself had 
made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more perfect 
than any other man, we may call Shakspeare in this : he dis- 
cerns, knows as by instinct, what condition he works under, 
what his materials are, what his own force and its relation to 
them is. It is not a transitory glance of insight that will suf- 
fice ; it is deliberate illumination of the whole matter ; it is a 
calmly seeing eye ; a great intellect, in short. How a man, 
of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will construct a 
narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will give 



Il6 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

of it, — is the best measure you could get of what intellect 
is in the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand 
prominent ; which unessential, fit to be suppressed ; where 
is the true beginning, the true sequence and ending ? To find 
out this, you task the whole force of insight that is in the 
man. He must understand ihe. thing ; according to the depth 
of his understanding, will the fitness of his answer be. You 
will try him so. Does like join itself to like ; does the spirit 
of method stir in that confusion, so that its embroilment be- 
comes order ? Can the man say. Fiat hix, Let there be light ; 
and out of chaos make a world ? Precisely as there is light 
in himself, will he accomplish this. 

Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Por- 
trait-painting, delineating of men and things, especially of 
men, that Shakspeare is great. All the greatness of the man 
comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, that 
calm creative perspicacity of Shakspeare. The thing he looks 
at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost heart, and 
generic secret : it dissolves itself as in light before him, so 
that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we 
said : poetic creation, what is this too but seeing the thing 
sufficiently 1 The word that will describe the thing, follows 
of itself from such clear intense' sight of the thing. And is 
is not Shakspeare's morality, his valor, candor, tolerance, 
truthfulness ; his whole victorious strength and greatness, 
which can triumph over such obstructions, visible there too .'* 
Great as the world ! No twisted, poor convex-concave mir- 
ror, reflecting all objects with its own convexities and con- 
cavities; a perfectly 7^27^/ mirror ; — that is to say withal, if i 
we will understand it, a man justly related to all things and 
men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how this 
great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, 
an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus ; sets them all forth to us 



THE HERO AS POET. WJ 

m their round completeness ; loving, just, the equal brother 
of all. Novum Organuin, and all the intellect you will find 
in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthy, material, 
poor, in comparison with this. Among modern men, one 
finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe 
alone, since the days of Shakspeare, reminds me of it. Of 
him too you say that he saw the object ; you may say what 
he himself says of Shakspeare : " His characters are like 
watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal ; they show 
you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is 
all visible." 

The seeing eye ! It is this that discloses the inner har- 
mony of things ; what Nature meant, what musical idea 
Nature has wrapped up in these often rough embodiments. 
Something she did mean. To the seeing eye that something 
were discernible. Are they base, miserable things.'* You 
can laugh over them, you can weep over them ; you can in 
some way or other genially relate yourself to them ; — you can, 
at lowest, hold your peace about them, turn away your own 
and others' face from them, till the hour come for practically 
exterminating and extinguishing them ! At bottom, it is the 
Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have intellect 
enough. He will be a Poet if he have : a Poet in word ; or 
failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he 
write at all; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will 
depend on accidents : who knows on what extremely trivial 
accidents, — perhaps on his having had a singing-master, on 
his being taught to sing in his boyhood! But the faculty 
which enables him to discern the inner heart of things, and 
the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a 
harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and 
exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of 
Nature herself ; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what 



Il8 LECTURES ON HEkOiLS. 

sort soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of 
all, See. If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep string- 
ing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, 
and narne yourself a Poet ; there is no hope for you. If you 
can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or speculation, all 
manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to 
ask, when they brought him a new pupil, " But are ye sure 
he's not a diuicef'' Why, really one might ask the same 
thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever func- 
tion ; and consider it as the one inquiry needful : Are ye 
sure he's not a dunce .^ There is, in this world, no other 
entirely fatal person. 

For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a 
man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define 
Shakspeare's faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, 
and think I had included all under that. What indeed are 
faculties ? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, 
things separable ; as if a man had intellect, imagination, 
fancy, etc., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a capi- 
tal error. Then again, we hear of a man's "intellectual 
nature," and of his " moral nature," as if these again were 
divisible, and existed apart. Necessities of language do per- 
haps prescribe such forms of utterance ; we must speak, I 
am aware, in that way, if we are to speak at all. But words 
ought not to harden into things for us. It seems to me, our 
apprehension of this matter is, for most part, radically falsi- 
fied thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep forever 
in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but fiames; that 
man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, 
is essentially one and indivisible ; that what we call imagina- 
tion, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different 
figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly con- 
nected with each other, physiognomically related ; that if we 



% 



THE HERO AS POET. IT^ 

knew one of them, we might know all of them. MoraHty 
itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this 
but another side of the one vital Force whereby he is and 
works ? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. 
You may see how a man would fight, by the way in which he 
sings ; his courage, or want of courage, is visible in the word 
he utters, in the opinion he has formed, no less than in the 
stroke he strikes. He is onej and preaches the same Self 
abroad in all these ways. 

Without hands a man might have feet, and could still 
Walk : but, consider it, — without morality, intellect were 
impossible for him ; a thoroughly immoral man could not 
know any thing at all ! To know a thing, what we can call 
knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathize with 
it : that is, be virtuously related to it. If he have not the 
justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the 
courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how 
shall he know ? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in 
his knowledge. Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, 
to the selfish and the pusillanimous forever a sealed book : 
what such can know of Nature is mean, superficial, small ; 
for the uses of the day merely. — But does not the very Fox 
know something of Nature.'* Exactly so: it knows where 
the geese lodge ! The human Reynard, very frequent every- 
where in the world, what more does he know but this and 
the like of this ? Nay, it should be considered too, that if 
the Fox had not a certain vulpine morality^ he could not 
even know where the geese were, or get at the geese ! If 
he spent his time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his 
own misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and other 
Foxes, and so forth ; and had not courage, promptitude, 
practicality, and other suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he 
would catch no geese. We may say of the Fox too, that his 



I^O LECTURES ON HEROES. 

morality and insight are of the same dimensions; different 
faces of the same internal unity of vulpine life ! — These 
things are worth stating; for the contrary of them acts with 
manifold very baleful perversion, in this time : what limita- 
tions, modifications they require, your own candor will supply. 

If I say, therefore, that Shakspeare is the greatest of 
Intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is . 
more, in Shakspeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It | 
is what I call an unconscious intellect ; there is more virtue 
in it than he himself is aware of. Novalis beautifully re- 
marks of him, that those Dramas of his are Products of 
Nature too, deep as Nature herself. I find a great truth 
in this saying. Shakspeare's Art is not Artifice ; the noblest 
worth of it is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows 
up from the deeps of Nature, through this noble sincere 
soul, who is a voice of Nature. The latest generations o4 
men will find new meanings in Shakspeare, new elucidations 
of their own human being; "new harmonies with the infinite 
structure of the Universe ; concurrences with later ideas, 
affinities with the higher powers and senses of man." This 
well deserves meditating. It is Nature's highest reward to 
a true simple great soul, that he get thus to be a part of 
herself. Such a man's works, whatsoever he with utmost 
conscious exertion and forethought shall accomplish, grow up 
withal ?/;/consciously, from the unknown deeps in him; — as 
the oak-tree grows from the Earth's bosom, as the mountains 
and waters shape themselves; with a symmetry grounded on 
Nature's own laws, conformable to all Truth whatsoever. 
How much in Shakspeare lies hid; his sorrows, his silent 
struggles known to himself; much that was not known at all, 
not speakable at all : like roots^ like sap and forces working 
-underground! Speech is great; but Silence is greater. 

Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I 



% 



TME HERO AS POET. 121 

will not blame Dante for his misery : it is as battle without 
victory ; but true battle, — the first, indispensable thing. 
Yet I call Shakspeare greater than Dante, in that he fought 
truly, and did conquer. Doubt it not, he had his own sor 
rows: \ho^^ So7tnets of his will even testify expressly in 
what deep waters he had waded, and swum struggling for 
his life; — as what man like him ever failed to have to do.-* 
It seems to me a heedless notion, our common one, that he 
sat like a bird on the bough ; and sang forth, free and off- 
hand, never knowing the troubles of other men. Not so ; 
with no man is it so. How could a man travel forward from 
rustic deer-poaching to such tragedy-writing, and not fall in 
with sorrows by the way? Or, still better, how could a 
man delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth, so many 
suffering heroic hearts, if his own heroic heart had never 
suffered? — And now, in contrast with all this, observe his 
mirthfulness, his genuine overflowing love of laughter ! You 
would say, in no point does he exaggerate but only in laugh- 
ter. Fiery objurgations, words that pierce and burn, are to 
be found in Shakspeare ; yet he is always in measure here ; 
never what Johnson would remark as a specially "good 
hater." But his laughter seems to pour from him in floods ; 
he heaps all manner of ridiculous nicknames on the butt he 
is bantering, tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of horse- 
play; you would say, with his whole heart laughs. And 
then, if not always the finest, it is always a genial laughter. 
Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No 
man who can laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at 
these things. It is some poor character only desiring to 
laugh, and have the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter 
means sympathy; good laughter is not "the crackHng of 
thorns under the pot." Even at stupidity and pretension 
this Shakspeare does not laugh otherwise than genially. 



122 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts ; and we dis- 
miss them covered with explosions of laughter : but we like 
the poor fellows only the better for our laughing ; and hope 
they will get on well there, and continue Presidents of the 
City-watch. Such laughter, like sunshine on the deep sea, 
is very beautiful to me. 

We have no room to speak of Shakspeare's individual 
works; though perhaps there is much still waiting to be said 
on that head. Had we, for instance, all his plays reviewed 
as Hamlet, in Wilhebn Meister, is ! A thing which might, 
one day, be done. August Wilhelm Schlegel has a remark 
on his Historical Plays, Henry Fifth and the others, which 
is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of National 
Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, said he knew no Eng- 
lish History but what he had learned from Shakspeare. 
There are really, if we look to it, few as memorable Histo- 
ries. The great saHent points are admirably seized ; all 
rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence ; it is, as 
Schlegel says, epic; — as indeed all dehneation by a great 
thinker will be. There are right beautiful things in those 
Pieces, which indeed together form one beautiful thing. That 
battle of Agincourt strikes me as one of the most perfect 
things, in its sort, we anywhere have of Shakspeare's. The 
description of the two hosts : the worn-out, jaded English ; 
the dread hour, big with destiny, when the battle shall begin ; 
and then that deathless valor : " Ye good yeomen, whose 
limbs were made in England ! " There is a noble Patriotism 
in it, — far other than the "indifference" you sometimes 
hear ascribed to Shakspeare. A true English heart breathes, 
calm and strong, through the whole business ; not boister- 
ous, protrusive ; all the better for that. There is a sound 
in it like the ring of steel. This man too had a right stroke 
in him, had it come to that ! 



THE HERO AS POET. I 23 

But I will say, of Shakspeare's works generally, that we 
have no full impress of him there; even as full as we have 
of many men. His works are so many windows, through 
which we see a glimpse of the world that was in him. All 
his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory, imperfect, 
written under cramping circumstances , giving only here and 
there a note -of the full utterance of the man. Passages 
there are that come upon you like splendor out of Heaven; 
bursts of radiance, illuminating the very heart of the thing: 
you say, " That is true^ spoken once and forever ; whereso- 
ever and whensoever there is an open human soul, that will 
be recognized as true ! " Such bursts, however, make us 
feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant ; that it is, in 
part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakspear§ had to write 
for the Globe Playhouse : his great soul had to crush itself, 
as it could, into that and no other mould. It was with him, 
then, as it is with us all. No man works save under condi- 
tions. The sculptor cannot set his own free Thought before 
us ; but his Thought as he could translate it into the stone 
that was given, with the tools that were given. Disjecta 
membra are all that we find of any Poet, or of any man. 

Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakspeare may recog- 
nize that he too was a Prophet^ in his way; of an insight 
analogous to the Prophetic, though he took it up in another 
strain. Nature seemed to this man also divine; 2^«speaka- 
ble, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven ; " We are such stuff as 
Dreams are made of ! " That scroll in Westminster Abbey, 
which few read with understanding, is of the depth of any 
seer. But the man sang; did not preach, except musically. 
We called Dante the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Cathol= 
icism. May we not call Shakspeare the still more melodious 
Priest of a true Catholicism, the " Universal Church " of the 



124 LECTURES OM HEROES. 

Future and of all times ? No narrow superstition, harsh 
asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or perversion : a 
Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousandfold hidden 
beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature ; which let all men 
worship as they can ! We may say without offence, that 
there rises a kind of universal Psalm out of this Shakspeare 
too ; not unfit to make itself heard among the still more 
sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony with these, if we under- 
stood them, but in harmony ! — I cannot call this Shakspeare 
a " Sceptic," as some do ; his indifference to the creeds and 
theological quarrels of his time misleading them. No : nei- 
ther unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism ; 
nor sceptic, though he says little about his Faith. Such 
" indifference " was the fruit of his greatness withal ; his 
whole heart was in his own grand sphere of worship (we may 
call it such); these other controversies, vitally important to 
x^her men, were not vital to him. 

But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right 
glorious thing, and set of things, this that Shakspeare has 
brought us 1 For myself, I feel that there is actually a kind 
of sacredness in the fact of such a man being sent into this 
Earth. Is he not an eye to us all ; a blessed heaven-sent 
Bringer of light? — And, at bottom, was it not perhaps far 
better that this Shakspeare, every way an unconscious man, 
was conscious of no Heavenly message 1 He did not feel, 
like Mahomet, because he saw into those internal Splendors, 
that he specially was the " Prophet of God : " and was he 
not greater than Mahomet in that? Greater; and also, if 
we compute strictly, as we did in Dante's case, more success- 
ful. It was intrinsically an error that notion of Mahomet's, 
of his supreme Prophethood ; and has come down to us inex- 
tricably involved in error to this day ; dragging along with 
it such a coil of fables, impurities, intolerances, as makes it a 



THE HERO AS POET. 1 25 

questionable step for me here and now to say, as I have done, 
that Mahomet was a true Speaker at all, and not rather an 
ambitious charlatan, perversity and simulacrum ; no Speaker, 
but a Babbler ! Even in Arabia, as I compute, Mahomet 
will have exhausted himself and become obsolete, while this 
Shakspeare, this Dante, may still be young; — while this 
Shakspeare may still pretend to be a Priest of Mankind, of 
Arabia as of other places, for unlimited periods to come ! 

Compared with any speaker or singer one knows, even 
with ^schylus or Homer, why should he not, for veracity 
and universality, last like them? He is siiicere as they; 
reaches deep down like them, to the universal and perennial. 
But as for Mahomet, I think it had been better for him not 
to be so conscious ! Alas, poor Mahomet ; all that he was 
conscious oi^2j& 2, mere error; a futility and triviality, — as 
indeed such ever is. The truly great in him too was the 
unconscious : that he was a wild Arab lion of the desert, and 
did speak out with that great thunder-voice of his, not by 
words which he thought to be great, but by actions, by feel- 
ings, by a history, which were great ! His Koran has become 
a stupid piece of prolix absurdity ; we do not believe, hke 
him, that God wrote that ! The Great Man here too, as 
always, is a Force of Nature : whatsoever is truly great i*^. 
him springs up from the //zarticulate deeps. 

Well : this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to 
be Manager of a Playhouse, so that he could live without 
begging; whom the Earl of Southampton cast some kind 
glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to him, 
was for sending to the Treadmill ! We did not account him 
a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us; — on which point 
there were much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat : 
In spite of the sad state Hero-worship now lies in, consider 



126 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

what this Shakspeare has actually become among us. Which 
Englishman we ever made, in this land of ours, which mil- 
lion of Englishmen, would we not give up rather than the 
Stratford Peasant? There is no regiment of highest Digni- 
taries that we would sell him for. He is the grandest thing 
we have yet done. For our honor among foreign nations, as 
an ornament to our English Household, what item is there 
that we would not surrender rather than him } Consider 
now, if they asked us. Will you give up your Indian Empire 
or your Shakspeare, you English ; never have had any 
Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakspeare .^ Really 
it were a grave question. Official persons would answer 
doubtless in official language ; but we, for our part too, 
should not we be forced to answer: Indian Empire, or no 
Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakspeare ! Indian 
Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakspeare 
does not go, he lasts forever with us ; we cannot give up our 
Shakspeare ! 

Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely 
as a real, marketable, tangibly-useful possession. England, 
before long, this Island of ours, will hold but a small frac- 
tion of the English : in America, in New Holland, east and 
west to the very Antipodes, there will be a Saxondom cover- 
ing great spaces of the Globe. And now, what is it that can 
keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so that 
they do not fall out and fight, but hve at peace, in brotherlike 
intercourse, helping one another? This is justly regarded as 
the greatest practical problem, the thing all manner of sov- 
ereignties and governments are here to accomplish : what 
is it that will accomplish this ? Acts of Parliament, admin- 
istrative prime-ministers, cannot. America is parted from 
us, so far as Parhament could part it. Call it not fantastic, 
for there is much reality in it ; Here, I say^ is an English 



THE HERO AS POET. 12/ 

King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination 
of Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakspeare, does 
not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the 
noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs ; ?*;^destriict- 
ible; really more valuable in that point of view than any 
other means or appliance whatsoever ? We can fancy him 
as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a 
thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, 
wheresoever, under what sort of Parish-Constable soever, 
Enghsh men and women are, they will say to one another : 
" Yes, this Shakspeare is ours ; we produced him, we speak 
and think by him ; we are of one blood and kind with him." 
The most common-sense politician, too, if he pleases, may 
think of that. 

Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an 
articulate voice ; that it produce a man who will speak forth 
melodiously what the heart of it means! Italy, for example, 
poor Italy lies dismembered, scattered asunder, not appear- 
ing in any protocol or treaty as a unity at all ; yet the noble 
Italy is actually otte : Italy produced its Dante; Italy can 
speak ! The Czar of all the Russias, he is strong, with so 
many bayonets, Cossacks and cannons ; and does a great 
feat in keeping such a tract of Earth politically together ; 
but he cannot yet speak. Something great in him, but it is 
a dumb greatness. He has had no voice of genius, to be 
heard of all men and times. He must learn to speak. He 
is a great dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and Cos- 
sacks will all have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante's 
voice is still audible. The Nation that has a Dante is bound 
together as no dumb Russia can be. — We must here end 
ifvhat we had to say pf th^ Hero-Poet. 



128 LECTURES ON HEROES. 



LECTURE TV. 

THE HERO AS PRIEST. LUTHER; REFORMATION; KNOX; 
PURITANISM. 

[Friday, j^th May, 1840.] 

OUR present discourse is to be of the Great Man as 
Priest. We have repeatedly endeavored to explain 
that all sorts of Heroes are intrinsically of the same ma- 
terial ; that given a great soul, open to the Divine Signifi- 
cance of Life, then there is given a man fit to speak of this, 
to sing of this, to fight and work for this, in a great, victori- 
ous, enduring manner; there is given a Hero, — the outward 
shape of whom v;ill depend on the time and the environment 
he finds himself in. The Priest too, as I understand it, is a 
kind of Prophet; in him too there is required to be a light 
of inspiration, as we must name it. He presides over the 
worship of the people ; is the Uniter of them with the Unseen 
Holy. He is the spiritual Captain of the people ; as the 
Prophet is their spiritual King with many captains : he 
guides them heavenward, by wise guidance through this 
Earth and its work. The ideal of him is, that he too be 
what we can call a voice from the unseen Heaven ; interpret- 
ing, even as the Prophet did, and in a more familiar manner 
unfolding the same to men. The unseen Heaven, — the 
"open secret of the Universe," — which so few have an eye 
for! He is the Prophet shorn of his mpre awful splendor; 




:% 



(^&-M 'J^ 



THE SPIRITUAL CAPTAIN OF THE PEOPLE." — Pa£-e I28, 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. 1 29 

burning with mild equable radiance, as the enlightener of daily 
life. This, I say, is the ideal of a Priest. So in old times ; 
so in these, and in all times. One knows very well that, in 
reducing ideals to practice, great latitude of tolerance is 
needful; very great. But a Priest who is not this at all, 
who does not any longer aim or try to be this, is a character 
— of whom we had rather not speak in this place. 

Luther and Knox were by express vocation Priests, and 
did faithfully perform that function in its common sense. 
Yet it will suit us better here to consider them chiefly in 
their historical character, rather as Reformers than Priests. 
There have been other Priests perhaps equally notable, in 
calmer times, for doing faithfully the office of a Leader of 
Worship; bringing down, by faithful heroism in that kind, 
a light from Heaven into the daily life of their people ; lead- 
ing them forward, as under God's guidance, in the way 
wherein they were to go. But when this same way was a 
rough one, of battle, confusion and danger, the spiritual 
Captain, who led through that, becomes, especially to us who 
live under the fruit of his leading, more notable than any 
other. He is the warfaring and battling Priest; who led 
his people, not to quiet faithful labor as in smooth times, 
but to faithful valorous conflict, in times all violent, dismem- 
bered : a more perilous service, and a more memorable one, 
be it hisfher or not. These two men we will account our 
best Priests, inasmuch as they were our best Reformers. 
Nay I may ask, Is not every true Reformer, by the nature 
of him, a Priest ^x^t of all? He appeals to Heaven's invisi- 
ble justice against Earth's visible force ; knows that it, the 
invisible, is strong and alone strong. He is a believer in 
the divine truth of things ; a seer^ seeing through the show 
of things ; a worshipper, in one way or the other, of the 
diyirie truth of things ; a Priest, that is, If he be not 



130 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

first a Priest, he will never be good for much as a Re- 
former. 

Thus then, as we have seen Great Men, in various situa- 
tions, building up Religions, heroic Forms of human Exist- 
ence in this world, Tlieories of Life worthy to be sung by a 
Dante, Practices of Life by a Shakspeare, — we are now to 
see the reverse process ; which also is necessary, which also 
may be carried on in the Heroic manner. Curious how this 
should be necessary : yet necessary it is. The mild shining 
of the Poet's light has to give place to the fierce lightning of 
the Reformer: unfortunately the Reformer too is a person- 
age that cannot fail in History ! The Poet indeed, with his 
mildness, what is he but the product and ultimate adjust- 
ment of Reform, or Prophecy, with its fierceness ? No wild 
Saint Dominies and Thebaid Eremites, there had been no 
melodious Dante ; rough Practical Endeavor, Scandinavian 
and other, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to 
Cranmer, enabled Shakspeare to speak. Nay the finished 
Poet, I remark sometimes, is a symptom that his epoch 
itself has reached perfection and is finished ; that before 
long there will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed. 

Doubtless it were finer, could we go along always in the 
way of music J be tamed and taught by our Poets, as the 
rude creatures were by their Orpheus of old. Or failing this 
rhythmic musical way, how good were it could we get so 
much as into the equable way ; I mean, if peaceable Priests, 
reforming from day to day, would always suffice us ! But it 
is not so ; even this latter has not yet been realized. Alas, 
|;he battling Reformer too is, from time to time, a needful 
and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never want- 
ing: the very things that were once indispensable further- 
ances become obstructions ; and need to be shaken off, and 
left behitid us, — a business often of enorrnous difficulty. 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. I3I 

It is notable enough, surely, how a Theorem or spiritual 
Representation, so we may call it, which once took in the 
whole Universe, and was completely satisfactory in all parts 
of it to the highly discursive acute intellect of Dante, one of 
the greatest in the world, — had in the course of another 
century become dubitable to common intellects ; become 
deniable ; and is now, to every one of us, flatly incredible, 
obsolete as Odin's Theorem ! To Dante, human Existence, 
and God's ways with men, were all well represented by 
those Malebolges^ Purgatorios j to Luther not well. How 
was this ? Why could not Dante's Catholicism continue ; 
but Luther's Protestantism must needs follow ? Alas, noth- 
ing will continue. 

I do not make much of " Progress of the Species," as 
handled in these times of ours ; nor do I think you would 
care to hear much about it. The talk on that subject is too 
often of the most extravagant, confused sort. Yet I may 
say, the fact itself seems certain enough ; nay we can trace 
out the inevitable necessity of it in the nature of things. 
Every man, as I have stated somewhere, is not only "^ 
learner but a doer : he learns with the mind given him what 
has been ; but with the same mind he discovers farther, he 
invents and devises somewhat of his own. Absolutely with- 
out originality there is no man. No man whatever believes, 
or can believe, exactly what his grandfather believed : he 
enlarges somewhat, by fresh discovery, his view of the 
Universe, and consequently his Theorem of the Universe, 
— which is an infinite Universe, and can never be embraced 
wholly or finally by any view or Theorem, in any conceiva- 
ble enlargement : he enlarges somewhat, I say ; finds some- 
what that was credible to his grandfather incredible to 
him, false to him, inconsistent with some new thing he has 
discovered or observed. It i§ the history of every man ; 



132- LECTURES ON HIlROES. 

and in the history of Mankind we see it summed up into 
great historical amounts, — revolutions, new epochs. Dante's 
Mountain of Purgatory does not stand " in the ocean of the 
other Hemisphere," when Columbus has once sailed thither! 
Men find no such thing extant in the other Hemisphere. It 
is not there. It must cease to be believed to be there. So 
with all beliefs whatsoever in this world, — all Systems of 
Belief, and Systems of Practice that spring from these. 

If we add now the melancholy fact, that when Belief 
waxes uncertain, Practice too becomes unsound, and errors, 
injustices and miseries everywhere more and more prevail, 
we shall see material enough for revolution. At all turns, 
a man who will do faithfully, needs to believe firmly. If he 
have to ask at every turn the world's suffrage ; if he cannot 
dispense with the world's suffrage, and make his own suf- 
frage serve, he is a poor eye-servant ; the work committed 
to him will be ;;zzj'done. Every such man is a daily contrib- 
utor to the inevitable downfall. Whatsoever work he does, 
dishonestly, with an eye to the outward look of it, is a 
new offence, parent of new misery to somebody or other. 
Offences accumulate till they become insupportable ; and 
are then violently burst through, cleared off as by explosion. 
Dante's sublime Catholicism, incredible now in theory, and 
defaced still worse by faithless, doubting and dishonest 
practice, has to be torn asunder by a Luther ; Shakspeare's 
noble Feudalism, as beautiful as it once looked and was, 
has to end in a French Revolution. The accumulation of 
offences is, as we say, too literally exploded, blasted asunder 
volcanically ; and there are long troublous periods before 
matters come to a settlement again. 

Surely it were mournful enough to look only at this face 
of the matter, and find in all human opinions and arrange- 
ir^ents merely the fact that they were uncertain,, temporary, 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. I33 

subject to the law of death ! At bottom, it is not so : all 
death, here too we find, is but of the body, not of the essence 
or soul ; all destruction, by violent revolution or howsoever 
it be, is but new creation on a wider scale. Odinism was 
Valor J Christianism was Hti7nility, a nobler kind of Valor. 
No thought that ever dwelt honestly as true in the heart of 
man but %vas an honest insight into God's truth on man's 
part, and has an essential truth in it which endures through 
all changes, an everlasting possession for us all. And, on 
the other hand, what a melancholy notion is that, which has 
to represent all men, in all countries and times except our 
own, as having spent their life in blind condemnable error, 
mere lost Pagans, Scandinavians, Mahometans, only that 
we might have the true ultimate knowledge ! All genera- 
tions of men were lost and wrong, only that this present 
little section of a generation might be saved and right. 
They all marched forward there, all generations since the 
beginning of the world, like the Russian soldiers into the 
ditch of Schweidnitz Fort, only to fill up the ditch with their 
dead bodies, that we might march over and take the place ! 
It is an incredible hypothesis. 

Such incredible hypothesis we have seen maintained with 
fierce emphasis ; and this or the other poor individual man, 
with his sect of individual men, marching as over the dead 
bodies of all men, towards sure victory : but when he too, 
with his hypothesis and ultimate infallible credo, sank into 
the ditch, and became a dead body, what was to be said ? — 
Withal, it is an important fact in the nature of man, that he 
tends to reckon his own insight as final, and goes upon it as 
such. He will always do it, I suppose, in one or the other 
way; but it must be in some wider, wiser way than this. Are 
not all true men that live, or that ever lived, soldiers of the 
same army, enlisted, under Heaven's captaincy, to do battle 



134 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

against the same enemy, the empire of Darkness and 
Wrong? Why should we misknovv one another, fight not 
against the enemy but against ourselves, from mere differ- 
ence of uniform ? All uniforms shall be good, so they hold 
in them true valiant men. All fashions of arms, the Arab 
turban and swift cimeter, Thor's strong hammer smiting 
down J'dtuns^ shall be welcome. Luther's battle-voice, 
Dante's march-melody, all genuine things are with us, not 
against us. We are all under one Captain, soldiers of the 
same host. — Let us now look a little at this Luther's 
fighting ; what kind of battle it was, and how he comported 
himself in it. Luther too as of our spiritual Heroes ; a 
Prophet to his country and time. 

As introductory to the whole, a remark about Idolatry 
will perhaps be in place here. One of Mahomet's character- 
istics, which indeed belongs to all Prophets, is unlimited 
implacable zeal against Idolatry. It is the grand theme of 
Prophets : Idolatry, the worshipping of dead Idols as the 
Divinity, is a thing they cannot away with, but have to 
denounce continually, and brand with inexpiable reprobation ; 
it is the chief of all the sins they see done under the sun. 
This is worth noting. We will not enter here into the 
theological question about Idolatry. Idol is Eidolon^ a 
thing seen, a symbol. It is not God, but a Symbol of 
God'; and perhaps one may question whether any the most 
benighted mortal ever took it for more than a Symbol. I 
fancy, he did not think that the poor image his own hands 
had made was God ; but that God was emblemed by it, that 
God was in it some way or other. And now in this sense, 
one may ask, Is not all worship whatsoever a worship by 
Symbols, by eidola, or things seen } Whether seen, rendered 
visible as an image or picture to the bodily eye ; or visible 



ai 



THE HERO AS PRIEST, 1 35 

only to the inward eye, to the imagination, to the intellect : 
this makes a superficial but no substantial difference. It is 
still a Thing Seen, significant of Godhead ; an Idol. The 
.most rigorous Puritan has his Confession of Faith, and 
intellectual Representation of Divine things, and worships 
thereby; thereby is worship first made possible for him. 
All creeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptions that fitlj 
invest religious feelings, are in this sense eidola^ things seen. 
All worship whatsoever must proceed by Symbols, by Idols : 
— we may say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst 
Idolatry is only more idolatrous. 

Where, then, lies the evil of it .'' Some fatal evil must lie 
in it, or earnest prophetic men would not on all hands so 
reprobate it. Why is Idolatry so hateful to Prophets .'* It 
seems to me as if, in the worship of those poor wooden 
symbols, the thing that had chiefly provoked the Prophet, 
and filled his inmost soul with indignation and aversion, 
was not exactly what suggested itself to his own thought, 
and came out of him in words to others, as the thing. The 
rudest heathen that worshipped Canopus, or the Caabah 
Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was superior to the horse that 
worshipped nothing at all ! Nay there was a kind of lasting 
merit in that poor act of his ; analogous to what is still 
meritorious in Poets : recognition of a certain endless dwi?i£ 
beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects what- 
soever. Why should the Prophet so mercilessly condemn 
him ? The poorest mortal worshipping his Fetish, while 
his heart is full of it, may be an object of pity, of contempt 
and avoidance, if you will ; but cannot surely be an object 
of hatred. Let his heart be honestly full of it, the whole 
space of his dark narrow mind illuminated thereby ; in one 
word, let him entirely believe in his Fetish, — it will then be, 
I should say, if not well with him, yet as well as it can 



136 LECTURES ON IIEkOES: 

readily be made to be, and you will leave him alone, iinmo 
lested there. 

But here enters the fatal circumstance of Idolatry, that, 
in the era of the Prophets, no man's mind is any longer 
honestly filled with his Idol or Symbol. Before the Prophet 
can arise who, seeing through it, knows it to be mere 
wood, many men must have begun dimly to doubt that it 
was little more. Condemnable Idolatry is insincere Idolatry. 
Doubt has eaten out the heart of it : a human soul is seen 
clinging spasmodically to an Ark of the Covenant, which it 
half feels now to have become a Phantasm. This is one of 
the balefulest sights. Souls are no longer filled with their 
Fetish ; but only pretend to be filled, and would fain make 
themselves feel that they are filled. " You do not believe," 
said Coleridge; "you only believe that you believe." It is 
the final scene in all kinds of Worship and Symbolism ; the 
sure symptom that death is now nigh. It is equivalent to 
what we call Formulism, and Worship of Formulas, in these 
days of ours. No more immoral act can be done by a human 
creature ; for it is the beginning of all immorahty, or rather 
it is the impossibility henceforth of any morality whatsoever : 
the innermost moral soul is paralyzed thereby, cast into fatal 
magnetic sleep ! Men are no longer sincere men. I do 
not wonder that the earnest man denounces this, brands it, 
prosecutes it with inextinguishable aversion. He and it, all 
good and it, are at death-feud. Blamable Idolatry is Cant, 
and even what one may call Sincere-Cant. Sincere-Cant : 
that is worth thinking of ! Every sort of Worship ends 
with this phasis. 

I find Luther to have been a Breaker of Idols, no less than 

any other Prophet. The wooden gods of the Koreish, made 

of timber and beeswax, were not more hateful to Mahomet 

1 an Tetzel's Pardons of Sin, made of sheepskin and ink. 



TttE HERO AS PRtEST. fj^ 

were to Luther. It is the property of every Hero, in every 
time, in every place and situation, that he come back to 
reality ; that he stand upon things, and not shows of things. 
According as he loves, and venerates, articulately or with 
deep speechless thought, the awful realities of things, so 
will the hollow shows of things, however regular, decorous, 
accredited by Koreishes or Conclaves, be intolerable and 
detestable to him. Protestantism too is the work of a 
Prophet: the prophet- work of that sixteenth century. The 
first stroke of honest demolition to an ancient things grrown 
false and idolatrous ; preparatory afar off to a new thing, 
which shall be true, and authentically divine ! 

At first view it might seem as if Protestantism were 
entirely destructive to this that we call Hero-worship, and 
represent as the basis of all possible good, religious or 
social, for mankind. One often hears it said that Protestant- 
ism introduced a new era, radically different from any the 
world had ever seen before : the era of '•' private judgment," 
as they call it. By this revolt against the Pope, every man 
became his own Pope ; and learnt, among other things, that 
he must never trust any Pope, or spiritual Hero-captain, any 
more ! Whereby, is not spiritual union, all hierarchy and 
subordination among men, henceforth an impossibihty 1 So 
we hear it said. — Now I need not deny that Protestantism 
was a revolt against spiritual sovereignties, Popes and much 
else. Nay I will grant that English Puritanism, revolt 
against earthly sovereignties, was the second act of it ; that 
the enormous French Revolution itself was the third act, 
whereby all sovereignties earthly and spiritual were, as 
might seem, abolished or made sure of abolition. Protes- 
tantism is the grand root from which our whole subsequent 
European History branches out. For the spiritual will 
always body itself forth in the temporal history of menj; 



13^ LECTURES OM HEROES. 



■^w 



the spiritual is the beginning of the temporal. And now 
sure enough, the cry is everywhere for Liberty and Equality, 
Independence and so forth ; instead of Kings, Ballot-boxes 
and Electoral suffrages : it seems made out that any Hero- 
sovereign, or loyal obedience of men to a man, in things 
temporal or things spiritual, has passed away forever from 
the world. I should despair of the world altogether, if so. 
One of my deepest convictions is, that it is not so. Without 
sovereigns, true sovereigns, temporal and spiritual, I see 
nothing possible but an anarchy ; the hatefulest of things. 
But I find Protestantism, whatever anarchic democracy it have 
produced, to be the beginning of new genuine sovereignty 
and order. I find it to be a revolt against false sovereigns ; 
the painful but indispensable first preparative for true 
sovereigns getting place among us ! This is worth explain- 
ing a little. 

Let us remark, therefore, in the first place, that this of 
" private judgment " is, at bottom, not a new thing in the 
world, but only new at that epoch of the world. There is 
nothing generically new or peculiar in the Reformation; it 
was a return to Truth and Reality in opposition to Falsehood 
and Semblance, as all kinds of Improvement and genuine 
Teaching are and have been. Liberty of private judgment, 
if we will consider it, must at all times have existed in the 
world. Dante had not put out his eyes, or tied shackles on 
himself: he was at home in that Catholicism of his, a free- 
seeing soul in it, — if many a poor Hogstraten, Tetzel and 
Dr. Eck had now become slaves in it. Liberty of judgment .^ 
No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever com-" 
pel the soul of a man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his 
own indefeasible light, that judgment of his ; he will reign, 
and believe there, by the grace of God alone ! The sorriest 
sophistical Bellarmine, preaching sightless faith and passive 



THE H^kO AS PRIEST. 13^ 

obedience, rcust first, by some kind of conviction^ have abdi- 
cated his right to be convinced. His " private judgment " 
indicated that, as the advisablest step he could take. The 
right of private judgment will subsist, in full force, wherever 
true men subsist. A true man believes with his whole judg- 
ment, with all the illumination and discernment that is in 
him, and has always so believed. A false man, only strug- 
ling to " beheve that he beheves," will naturally manage it 
in some other way. Protestantism said to this latter. Woe ! 
and to the former, Well done ! At bottom, it was no new 
saying; it was a return to all old sayings that ever had been 
said. Be genuine, be sincere : that was, once more, the 
meaning of it. Mahomet beheved with his whole mind ; 
Odin with his whole mind, — he, and all true Followers of 
Odinism. They, by their private judgment, had "judged" 
— so. 

And now I venture to assert, that the exercise of private 
judgment, faithfully gone about, does by no means neces- 
sarily end in selfish independence, isolation ; but rather ends 
necessarily in the opposite of that. It is not honest inquiry 
that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half-belief 
and untruth that make it. A man protesting against error 
is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that 
believe in truth. There is no communion possible among 
men who believe only in hearsays. The heart of each is 
lying dead ; has no power of sympathy even with things., — 
or he would believe them and not hearsays. No sympathy 
even with things; how much less with his fellow-men! He 
cannot unite with m,en ; he is an anarchic man. Only in a 
world of sincere men is unity possible ; — and there, in the 
long run, it is as good as certain. 

For observe one thing, a thing too often left out of view, 
01 rather altogether lost sight of, in this controversy : That 



140 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

it is not necessary a man should himself have discovered the 
truth he is to believe in, and never so sincerely to believe in. 
A Great Man, we said, was always sincere, as the first con- 
dition of him. But a man need not be great in order to be 
sincere ; that is not the necessity of Nature and all Time, 
but only of certain corrupt unfortunate epochs of Time. A 
man can believe, and make his own, in the most genuine 
way, what he has received from another ; — and with bound- 
less gratitude to that other ! The merit of originality is not 
novelty ; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original 
man : whatsoever he believes, he beheves it for himself, not 
for another. Every son of Adam can become a sincere man, 
an original man, in this sense ; no mortal is doomed to be 
an insincere man. Whole ages, what we call ages of Faith, 
are original; all men in them, or the most of men in them, 
sincere. These are the great and fruitful ages : every 
worker, in all spheres, is a worker not on semblance but on 
substance ; every work issues in a result : the general sum 
of such work is great ; for all of it, as genuine, tends towards 
one goal; all of it is additive, none of it subtractive. There 
is true union, true kingship, loyalty, all true and blessed 
things, so far as the poor Earth can produce blessedness for 
men. 

Hero-worship? Ah me, that a man be self-subsistent, 
original, true, or what we call it, is surely the farthest in the 
world from indisposing him to reverence and believe other 
men's truth ! It only disposes, necessitates and invincibly 
compels him to ^/i-believe other men's dead formulas, hear- 
says and untruths. A man embraces truth with his eyes 
open, and because his eyes are open : does he need to shut 
them before he can love his Teacher of truth ? He alone 
can love, with a right gratitude and genuine loyalty of soul, 
the Hero-Teacher who has delivered him out of darkness 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. I4I 

into light. Is not such a one a true Hero and Serpent- 
queller ; worthy of all reverence ! The black monster, False- 
hood, our one enemy in this world, lies prostrate by his 
valor; it was he that conquered the world for us! — See, 
accordingly, was not Luther himself reverenced as a true 
Pope, or Spiritual Father, being verily such? Napoleon, 
from amid boundless revolt of Sansculottism, became a 
King, Hero-worship never dies, nor can die. Loyalty and 
Sovereignty are everlasting in the world: — and there is 
this in them, that they are grounded not on garnitures and 
semblances, but on realities and sincerities. Not by shutting 
your eyes, your " private judgment ; " no, but by opening 
them, and by having something to see ! Luther's message 
was deposition and abolition to all false Popes and Poten- 
tates, but life and strength, though afar off, to new genuine 
ones. 

All this of Liberty and Equality, Electoral suffrages, 
Independence and so forth, we will take, therefore, to be a 
temporary phenomenon, by no means a final one. Though 
likely to last a long time, with sad enough embroilments for 
us all, we must w^elcome it, as the penalty of sins that are 
past, the pledge of inestimable benefits that are coming. 
In all ways, it behoved men to quit simulacra and return to 
fact; cost what it might, that did behove to be done. With 
spurious Popes, and Believers having no private judgment, 
— quacks pretending to command over dupes, — what can 
you do ? Misery and mischief only. You cannot make an 
association out of insincere men ; you cannot build an edifice 
except by plummet and level, at r/^^/-angles to one another ! 
In all this wild revolutionary work, from Protestantism down- 
wards, I see the blessedest result preparing itself : not abo- 
lition of Hero-worship, but rather what I would call a whole 
Wgrjd oi Heroes, If Hero mean sincere man^ why may not 



142 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

every one of us be a Hero ? A world all sincere, a believ 
mg world : the like has been ; the like will again be, — ' 
cannot help being. That were the right sort of Worshippers 
for Heroes : never could the truly Better be so reverenced 
as where all were True and Good ! — But we must hasten to 
Luther and his Life. 

Luther's birthplace was Eisleben in Saxony ; he came into 
the world there on the loth of November, 1483. It was an 
accident that gave this honor to Eisleben. His parents, poor 
mine-laborers in a village of that region, named Mohra, had 
gone to the Eisleben Winter-Fair; in the tumult of this scene 
the Frau Luther was taken with travail, found refuge in 
some poor house there, and the boy she bore was named 
Martin Luther. Strange enough to reflect upon it. This 
poor Frau Luther, she had gone with her husband to make 
her small merchandisings ; perhaps to sell the lock of yarn 
she had been spinning, to buy the small winter-necessaries 
for her narrow hut or household ; in the whole world, that 
day, there was not a more entirely unimportant-looking pair 
of people than this Miner and his Wife. And yet what 
were all Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in comparison ? 
There was born here, once more, a Mighty Man ; whose 
light was to flame as the beacon over long centuries and 
epochs of the world ; the whole world and its history was 
waiting for this man. It is strange, it is great. It leads us 
back to another Birth-hour, in a still meaner environment. 
Eighteen Hundred years ago, — of which it is fit that we 
say nothing, that we think only in silence ; for what words 
are there ! The Age of Miracles past ? The Age of Mira- 
cles is forever here ! 

I find it altogether suitable to Luther's function in this 
J^arth, and doubtless wisely ordered to that end by the 






IT 










" MARTIN LUTHER." Pu^^e 142. 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. 1 43 

Providence presiding over him and us and all things, that 
he was born poor, and brought up poor, one of the poorest 
of men. He had to beg, as the school-children in those 
times did ; singing for alms and bread, from door to door- 
Hardship, rigorous Necessity, was the poor boy's companion ; 
no man nor no thing would put on a false face to flatter 
Martin Luther. Among things, not among the shows of 
things, had he to grow. A boy of rude figure, yet with 
weak health, with his large greedy soul, full of all faculty 
and sensibility, he suffered greatly. But it was his task to 
get acquainted with realities, and keep acquainted with them, 
at whatever cost: his task was to bring the whole w^orld 
back to reality, for it had dwelt too long with semblance ! A 
youth nursed up in wintry whirlwinds, in desolate darkness 
and difficulty, that he may step forth at last from his stormy 
Scandinavia, strong as a true man, as a god : a Christian 
Odin, — aright Thor once more, with his thunder-hammer, 
to smite asunder ugly enough Jotiins and Giant-monsters ! 

Perhaps the turning incident of his life, we may fancy, 
was that death of his friend Alexis, by lightning, at the gate 
of Erfurt. Luther had struggled up through boyhood, better 
and worse ; displaying, in spite of all hindrances, the largest 
intellect, eager to learn : his father judging doubtless that 
he might promote himself in the world, set him upon the 
study of Law. This was the path to rise ; Luther, with 
little will in it either way, had consented : he was now nine- 
teen years of age. Alexis and he had been to see the old 
Luther people at Mansfeldt ; w^ere got back again near 
Erfurt, when a thunderstorm came on ; the bolt struck 
Alexis, he fell dead at Luther's feet. What is this Life of 
ours? — gone in a moment, burnt up like a scroll, into the 
blank Eternity ! What are all earthly preferments, Chan- 
cellorships, Kingships? They lie shrunk together — there.' 



144 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

The Earth has opened on them ; in a moment they are not, 
and Eternity is. Luther, struck to the heart, determined to 
devote himself to God and God's service alone. In spite 
of all dissuasions from his father and others, he became a 
Monk in the Augustine Convent at Erfurt. 

This was probably the first light-point in the history of 
Luther, his purer will now first decisively uttering itself; 
but, for the present, it was still as one light-point in an 
element all of darkness. He says he was a pious monk, 
ich bin ein p^oimner Monch gewesen j faithfully, painfully | 
struggling to work out the truth of this high act of his ; but ^ 
it was to little purpose. His misery had not lessened ; had 
"rather, as it were, increased into infinitude. The drudgeries | 
he had to do, as novice in his Convent, all sorts of slave- t 
work, were not his grievance : the deep earnest soul of the " 
man had fallen into all manner of black scruples, dubita- 
tions ; he believed himself likely to die soon, and far worse 
than die. • One hears with a new interest for poor Luther | 
that, at this time, he lived in terror of the unspeakable I 
misery ; fancied that he was doomed to eternal reprobation. 
Was it not the humble sincere nature of the man. ? What 
was he, that he should be raised to Heaven ! He that had 
known only misery, and mean slavery : the news was too 
blessed to be credible. It could not become clear to him \ 
how, by fasts, vigils, formalities and mass-work, a man's 
soul could be saved. He fell into the blackest wretched- 
ness ; had to wander staggering as on the verge of bottom- 
less Despair. 

It must have been a most blessed discovery, that of an 
old Latin Bible which he found in the Erfurt Library about 
this time. He had never seen the Book before. It taught 
Jiim another lesson than that of fasts and vigils. A brother 
monk too, of pious experience^ was helpful. Luther learned 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. 1 45 

now that a man was saved not by singing masses, but by 
the infinite grace of God : a more credible hypothesis. He 
gradually got himself founded, as on the rock. No wonder 
he should venerate the Bible, which had brought this blessed 
help to him. He prized it as the Word of the Highest must 
be prized by such a man. He determined to hold by that; 
as through life and to death he firmly did. 

This, then, is his deliverance from darkness, his final 
triumph over darkness, what we call his conversion ; for 
himself the most important of all epochs. That he should 
now grow daily in peace and clearness ; that, unfolding now 
the great talents and virtues implanted in him, he should 
rise to importance in his Convent, in his countr}^, and be 
found more and more useful in all honest business of life, 
is a natural result. He was sent on missions by his Augus- 
tine Order, as a man of talent and fidelity fit to do their 
business well : the Elector of Saxon}-, Friedrich, named the 
Wise, a truly wise and just prince, had cast his eye on him 
as a valuable person ; made him Professor in his new 
University of Wittenberg, Preacher too at Wittenberg; in 
both which capacities, as in all duties he did, this Luther, 
in the peaceable sphere of common life, was gaining more 
and more esteem with all good men. 

It was in his twenty-seventh year that he first saw Rome ; 
being sent thither, as I said, on mission from his Convent. 
Pope Julius the Second, and what was going on at Rome, 
must have filled the mind of Luther with amazement. He 
had come as to the Sacred City, throne of God's High- 
priest on Earth ; and he found it — what we know ! Many 
thoughts it must have given the man; many which we have 
no record of, which perhaps he did not himself know how 
to utter. This Rome, this scene of false priests, clothed 
wot in the beauty of holiness, but in far other vesture, is 



146 LECTURES ON HEROES, 

false : but what is it to Luther ? A mean man he, how shall 
he reform a world ? That was far from his thoughts. A 
humble, solitary man, why should he at all meddle with the 
world ? It was the task of quite higher men than he. His 
business was to guide his own footsteps wisely through 
the world. Let him do his own obscure duty in it well ; the 
rest, horrible and dismal as it looks, is in God's hand, not 
in his. 

It is curious to reflect what might have been the issue, 
had Roman Popery happened to pass this Luther by ; to go 
on in its great wasteful orbit, and not come athwart his little 
path, and force him to assault it ! Conceivable enough that, 
in this case, he might have held his peace about the abuses 
of Rome ; left Providence, and God on high, to deal with 
them ! A modest quiet man ; not prompt he to attack irrev- 
erently persons in authority. His clear task, as I say, was 
to do his own duty ; to walk wisely in this world of con- 
fused wickedness, and save his own soul alive. But the 
Roman Highpriesthood did come athwart him : afar off at 
Wittenberg he, Luther, could not get lived in honesty for it ; 
he remonstrated, resisted, came to extremity ; was struck at, 
struck again, and so it came to wager of battle between 
them ! This is worth attending to in Luther's history. 
Perhaps no man of so humble, peaceable a disposition ever 
filled the world with contention. We cannot but see that 
he would have loved privacy, quiet diligence in the shade ; 
that it was against his will he ever became a notoriety. 
Notoriety : what would that do for him ? The goal of his 
march through this world was the Infinite Heaven ; an 
indubitable goal for him : in a few years, he should either 
have attained that, or lost it forever ! We will say nothing 
at all, I think, of that sorrowfulest of theories, of its being 
some mean shopkeeper grudge, of the Augustine Monl^ 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. 1 47 

against the Dominican, that first kindled the wrath of Luther, 
and produced the Protestant Reformation. We will say to 
fhe people who maintain it, if indeed any such exist now : 
liet first into the sphere of thought by which it is so much 
as possible to judge of Luther, or of any man like Luther, 
otherwise than distractedly; we may then begin arguing 
with you. 

The Monk Tetzel, sent out carelessly in the way of trade, 
by Leo Tenth, — who merely wanted to raise a little money, 
and for the rest seems to have been a Pagan rather than a 
Christian, so far as he was any thing, — arrived at Witten- 
berg, and drove his scandalous trade there. Luther's flock 
bought Indulgences ; in the confessional of his Church, 
people pleaded to him that they had already got their sins 
pardoned. Luther, if he would not be found wanting at his 
own post, a false sluggard and coward at the very centre of 
the little space of ground that was his own and no other 
man's, had to step forth against Indulgences, and declare 
aloud that they were a futility and sorrowful mockery, that 
no man's sins could be pardoned by the?n. It was the begin- 
ning of the whole Reformation. We know how it went ; 
forward from this first public challenge of Tetzel, on the last 
day of October, 151 7, through remonstrance and argument; 
— spreading ever wider, rising ever higher ; till it became 
unquenchable, and enveloped all the world. Luther's heart's- 
desire was to have this grief and other griefs amended ; his 
thought was still far other than that of introducing separa- 
tion in the Church, or revolting against the Pope, Father of 
Christendom. — The elegant Pagan Pope cared little about 
this Monk and his doctrines ; wished, however, to have done 
with the noise of him : in a space of some three years, 
having tried various softer methods, he thought good to end 
it hy fire. He dooms the Monk's writings to be burnt by the 



148 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

hangman, and his body to be sent bound to Rome, — proba- 
bly for a similar purpose. It was the way they had ended 
with Huss, with Jerome, the century before. A short argu- 
ment, fire. Poor Huss : he came to that Constance Council, 
with all imaginable promises and safe-conducts ; an earnest, 
not rebellious kind of man : they laid him instantly in a 
stone dungeon " three feet wide, six feet high, seven feet 
long;" burnt the true voice of him out of this world; 
choked it in smoke and fire. That was not well done ! 

I, for one, pardon Luther for now altogether revolting 
against the Pope. The elegant Pagan, by this fire-decree of 
his, had kindled into noble just wrath the bravest heart then 
living in this world. The bravest, if also one of the hum- 
blest, peaceablest; it was now kindled. These words of 
mine, words of truth and soberness, aiming faithfully, as 
human inability would allow, to promote God's truth on 
Earth, and save men's souls, you, God's vicegerent on earth, f 
answer them by the hangman and fire ? You will burn me 
and them, for answer to the God's-message they strove to 
bring you ? You are not God's vicegerent ; you are another's 
than his, I think ! I take your Bull, as an emparchmented 
Lie, and burn //. You will do what you see good next: this 
is what I do. — It was on the loth of December, 1520, three 
years after the beginning of the business, that Luther, "with 
a great concourse of people," took this indignant step of 
burning the^ope's fire-decree "at the Elster-Gate of Witten- 
berg." Wittenberg looked on " with shoutings ; " the whole , 
world was looking on. The Pope should not have provoked 
that " shout " ! It was the shout of the awakening of nations. 
The quiet German heart, modest, patient of much, had at 
length got more than it could bear. Formulism, Pagan 
Popeism, and other Falsehood and corrupt Semblance had jj 
ruled long enough : and here once more was a man found 




"l TAKE YOUR BULL AS AN EMPARCHIVl ENTED LIE, AND BURN \T.^' — Page I^ 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. 1 49 

who durst tell all men that God's world stood not on sem- 
blances but on realities ; that Life was a truth, and not 
a He ! 

At bottom, as was said above, we are to consider Luther 
as a Prophet Idol-breaker; a bringer-back of men to reality. 
It is the function of great men and teachers. Mahomet said, 
These idols of yours are wood ; you put wax and oil on them, 
the flies stick on them ; they are not God, I tell you, they are 
black wood ! Luther said to the Pope, This thing of yours 
that you call a Pardon of Sins, it is a bit of rag-paper with 
ink. It is nothing else ; it, and so much like it, is nothing 
else. God alone can pardon sins. Popeship, spiritual Father- 
hood of God's Church, is that a vain semblance, of cloth and 
parchment? It is an awful fact. God's Church is not a 
semblance, Heaven and Hell are not semblances. I stand 
on this, since you drive me to it. Standing on this, I a poor 
German Monk am stronger than you all. I stand solitary, 
friendless, but on God's Truth ; you with your tiaras, triple- 
hats, with your treasuries and armories, thunders spiritual 
and temporal, stand on the Devil's Lie, and are not so 
strong ! — 

The Diet of Worms, Luther's appearance there on the 
17th of April, 1521, may be considered as the greatest scene 
in Modern European History ; the point, indeed, from which 
the whole subsequent history of civilization takes its rise. 
After multiplied negotiations, disputations, it had come to 
this. The young Emperor Charles Fifth, Avith all the Princes 
of Germany, Papal nuncios, dignitaries spiritual and tempo- 
ral, are assembled there : Luther is to appear and answer for 
himself, whether he will recant or not. The world's pomp 
and power sits there on this hand: on that, stands up for 
God's Truth, one man, the poor miner Hans Luther's Son. 
Friends had reminded him of Huss, advised him not to ga,* 



1 50 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

he would not be advised, A large company of friends rode 
out to meet him, with still more earnest warnings ; he an- 
swered, " Were there as many Devils in Worms as there are 
roof-tiles, I would on." The people, on the morrow, as he 
went to the Hall of the Diet, crowded the windows and 
housetops, some of them calling out to him, in solemn words, 
not to recant: "Whosoever denieth me before men!" they 
cried to him, — as in a kind of solemn petition and adjuration. 
Was it not in reality our petition too, the petition of the 
whole world, lying in dark bondage of soul, paralyzed under 
a black spectral Nightmare and triple-hatted Chimera, calling 
itself Father in God, and what not : " Free us ; it rests with 
thee ; desert us not ! " 

Luther did not desert us. His speech, of two hours, dis- 
tinguished itself by its respectful, wise and honest tone ; sub- 
missive to whatsoever could lawfully claim submission, not 
submissive to any more than that. His writings, he said, 
were partly his own, partly derived from the Word of God. 
As to what was his own, human infirmity entered into it; 
unguarded anger, blindness, many things doubtless which it 
were a blessing for him could he abolish altogether. But as 
to what stood on sound truth and the Word of God, he could 
not recant it. How could he .? " Confute me," he concluded, 
*' by proofs of Scripture, or else by plain just arguments : I 
cannot recant otherwise. For it is neither safe nor prudent 
to do aught against conscience. Here stand I ; I can do 
no other: God assist me!" — It is, as we say, the greatest 
moment in the Modern History of Men. English Puritanism, 
England and its Parliaments, Americas, and vast work these 
two centuries ; French Revolution, Europe and its work 
everywhere at present : the germ of it all lay there : had 
Luther in that moment done other, it had all been other- 
W^ise I The European World was asking him : Am I to sink 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. IS I 

ever lower into falsehood, stagnant putrescence, loathsome 
accursed death; or, with whatever paroxysm, to cast the 
falsehoods out of me, and be cured and live ? — 

Great wars, contentions and disunion followed out of this 
Reformation ; which last down to our day, and are yet far 
from ended. Great talk and crimination has been made 
about these* They are lamentable, undeniable; but after 
all, what has Luther or his cause to do with them ? It seems 
strange reasoning to charge the Reformation With all this. 
When Hercules turned the purifying river into King 
Aug-eas's stables, I have no doubt the confusion that re- 
suited was considerable all around : but I think it was not 
Hercules's blame ; it was some other's blame ! The Refor- 
mation might bring what results it Hked when it came, but 
the Reformation simply could not help coming. To all 
Popes and Popes' advocates, expostulating, lamenting and 
accusing, the answer of the world is : Once for all, your 
Popehood has become untrue. No matter how good it was, 
how good you say it is, we cannot beheve it; the light of our 
whole mind, given us to walk by from Heaven above, finds 
it henceforth a thing unbelievable. We will not believe it, 
we will not try to beheve it, — we dare not! The thing is 
tintrue; we were traitors against the Giver of all Truth, if 
we durst pretend to think it true. Away with it ; let whatso- 
ever hkes come in the place of it: with it we can have no 
farther trade ! — Luther and his Protestantism is not respon- 
sible for wars ; the false Simulacra that forced him to pro- 
test, they are responsible. Luther did what every man that 
God has made has not only the right, but hes under the 
sacred duty, to do: answered a Falsehood when it ques- 
tioned him, Dost thou believe me ? — No ! — At what cost 
soever, without counting of costs, this thing behoved to 




1^2 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

be done. Union, organization spiritual and material, a far 
nobler than any Popedom or Feudalism in their truest days. 
I never doubt, is coming for the world ; sure to come. But 
on Fact alone, not on Semblance and Simulacrum, will it be 
able either to come, or to stand when come. With union 
grounded on falsehood, and ordering us to speak and act 
lies, we will not have any thing to do. Peace 1 A brutal 
lethargy is peaceable, the noisome grave is peaceable. We 
hope for a living peace, not a dead one ! 

And yet, in prizing justly the indispensable blessings of 
the New, let us not be unjust to the Old. The Old was 
true, if it no longer is. In Dante's days it needed no 
sophistry, self-blinding or other dishonesty, to get itself 
reckoned true. It was good then; nay there is in the soul 
of it a deathless good. The cry of " No Popery " is foolish 
enough in these days. The speculation that Popery is on 
the increase, building new chapels and so forth, may pass 
for one of the idlest ever started. Very curious : to count up 
a few Popish chapels, listen to a few Protestant logic-chop- 
pings, — to much dull-droning drowsy inanity that still calls 
itself Protestant, and say : See, Protestantism is dead; Pope- 
ism is more alive than it, will be alive after it ! — Drowsy 
inanities, not a few, that call themselves Protestant are dead,- 
but Protestantistn has not died yet, that I hear of ! Protesr 
tantism, if we will look, has in these days produced its 
Goethe, its Napoleon ; German Literature and the French 
Revolution ; rather considerable signs of life ! Nay, at 
bottom, what else is alive hit Protestantism ? The life of 
most else that one meets is a galvanic one merely, — not a 
pleasant, not a lasting sort of life ! 
; Popery can build new chapels ; welcome to do so, to all 
lengths. Popery cannot come back, any more than Pagan^ 
3sm can, — which also still lingers in some countries. But, 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. 153 

indeed, it is with these things, as with the ebbing of the 
sea: you look at the waves oscillating hither, thither on 
the beach; for uiinictes you cannot tell how it is going; 
look in half an hour where it is, — look in half a century 
where your Popehood is! Alas, would there were no greater 
danger to our Europe than the poor old Pope's revival ! 
Thor may as soon try to revive. — And withal this oscilla- 
tion has a meaning. The poor old Popehood will not die 
away entirely, as Thor has done, for some time yet ; nor 
ought it. We may say, the Old never dies till this happen, 
Till all the soul of good that was in it have got itself trans- 
fused into the practical New.' While a good work remains 
capable of being done by the Romish form ; or, what is 
inclusive of all, while a pious life remains capable of being 
led by it, just so long, if we consider, will this or the other 
human soul adopt it, go about as a living witness of it. So 
long it will obtrude itself on the eye of us who reject it, till 
we in our practice too have appropriated whatsoever of truth 
was in it. Then, but also not till then, it will have no 
charm more for any man. It lasts here for a purpose. Let 
it last as long as it can. 

Of Luther I will add now, in reference to all these wars 
and bloodshed, the noticeable fact that none of them began 
so long as he continued living. The controversy did not 
get to fighting so long as he was there. To me it is proof 
of his greatness in all senses, this fact. How seldom do 
we find a man that has stirred up some vast commotion, 
who does not himself perish, swept away in it ! Such is the 
usual course of revolutionists. Luther continued, in a good 
degree, sovereign of this greatest revolution ; all Protestants, 
of what rank or function soever, looking much to him for 
guidance : and he held it peaceable, continued firm at the 



1 54 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

centre of it. A man to do this must have a kingly faculty; 
he must have the gift to discern at all turns where the true 
heart of the matter lies, and to plant himself courageously 
on that, as a strong true man, that other true men may rally 
round him there. He will not continue leader of men other- 
wise. Luther's clear deep force of judgment, his force of 
all sorts, of silence^ of tolerance and moderation, among 
others, are very notable in these circumstances. 

Tolerance, I say ; a very genuine kind of tolerance : he 
distinguishes what is essential, and what is not ; the unes- 
sential may go very much as it will. A complaint comes to 
him that such and such a Reformed Preacher "will not 
preach without a cassock." Well, answers Luther, what 
harm will a cassock do the man? "Let him have a cassock 
to preach in ; let him have three cassocks if he find benefit 
in them ! " His conduct in the matter of Karlstadt's wild 
image-breaking ; of the Anabaptists ; of the Peasants' War, 
shows a noble strength, very different from spasmodic vio- 
lence. With sure prompt insight he discriminates what is 
what: a strong just man, he speaks forth what is the wise 
course, and all men follow him in that. Luther's Written 
Works give similar testimony of him. The dialect of these 
speculations is now grown obsolete for us ; but one still 
reads them with a singular attraction. And indeed the 
mere grammatical diction is still legible enough ; Luther's 
merit in literary history is of the greatest ; his dialect be- 
came the language of all writing. They are not well written, 
these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his ; written hastily, 
with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have 
I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty 
of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, 
simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He flashes 
out illumination from him ; his smiting idiomatic phrases 




0<1 

I 



THE HERO js Priest. 155 

seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good 
humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness, and depth : this 
man could have been a Poet too ! He had to work an Epic 
Poem, not write one. I call him a great Thinker; as indeed 
his greatness of heart already betokens that. 

Richter says of Luther's words, "his words are half- 
battles." They may Le called so. The essential quality of 
him was, that he could fight and conquer; that he was a 
right piece of human Valor. No more valiant man, no 
mortal heart to be called braver, that one has record of, 
ever lived in that Teutonic Kindred, whose character is 
valor. His defiance of the " Devils " in Worms was not 
a mere boast, as the like might be if now spoken. It was a 
faith of Luther's that there were Devils, spiritual denizens 
of the Pit, continually besetting men. Many times, in his 
writings, this turns up ; and a most small sneer has been 
grounded on it by some. In the room of the Wartburg 
where he sat translating the Bible, they still show you a 
black spot on the wall; the strange memorial of one of these 
conflicts. Luther sat translating one of the Psalms ; he was 
worn down with long labor, with sickness, abstinence from 
food : there rose before him some hideous indefinable Imag-e, 
which he took for the Evil One, to forbid his work : Luther 
started up, with fiend-defiance; flung his inkstand at the 
spectre, and it disappeared ! The spot still remains there ; 
a curious monument of several things. Any apothecary's 
apprentice can now tell us what we are to think of this 
apparition, in a scientific sense : but the man's heart that 
dare rise defiant, face to face, against Hell itself, can give 
no higher proof of fearlessness. The thing he will quail 
before exists not on this Earth or under it. — Fearless 
enough ! " The Devil is aware," writes he on one occasion, 
"that this does not proceed out of fear in me. I have seen 



156 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

and defied innumerable Devils. Duke George," of Leipzig, 
a great enemy of his, " Duke George is not equal to one 
Devil," — far short of a Devil! "If I had business at 
Leipzig, I would ride into Leipzig, though it rained Duke- 
Georges for nine days running." What a reservoir of 
Dukes to ride into ! — 

At the same time, they err greatly who imagine that this 
man's courage was ferocity, mere coarse disobedient obsti- 
nacy and savagery, as many do. Far from that. There 
may be an absence of fear which arises from the absence of 
thought or affection, from the presence of hatred and stupid 
fury. We do not value the courage of the tiger highly ! 
With Luther it was far otherwise ; no accusation could be 
more unjust that this of mere ferocious violence brought 
against him. A most gentle heart withal, full of pity and 
love, as indeed the truly valiant heart ever is. The tiger 
before a sfrojiger foe — flies : the tiger is not what we call 
valiant, only fierce and cruel. I know few things more 
touching than those soft breathings of affection, soft as a 
child's or a mother's, in this great wild heart of Luther. 
So honest, unadulterated with any cant ; homely, rude in 
their utterance ; pure as water welling from the rock. What, 
in fact, was all that downpressed mood of despair and repro- 
bation, which we saw in his youth, but the outcome of pre- | 
eminent thoughtful gentleness, affections too keen and fine .'* 
It is the course such men as the poor Poet Cowper fall into. 
Luther to a slight observer might have seemed a timid, weak 
man ; modesty, affectionate shrinking tenderness the chief 
distinction of him. It is a noble valor which is roused in a, 
heart hke this, once stirred up into defiance, all kindled into] 
a heavenly blaze. 

In Luther's Table-Talk^ a posthumous Book of anecdotes 
and sayings collected by his friends, the most interesting 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. 1 57 

now of all the Books proceeding. from him, we have many 
beautiful unconscious displays of the man, and what sort of 
nature he had. His behavior at the deathbed of his little 
Daughter, so still, so great and loving, is among the most 
affecting things. He is resigned that his little Magdalene 
should die, yet longs inexpressibly that she might live ; — 
follows, in awestruck thought, the flight of her little soul 
through those unknown realms. Awestruck ; most heartfelt, 
we can see ; and sincere, — for after all dogmatic creeds and 
articles, he feels what nothing it is that we know, or can 
know: His little Magdalene shall be with God, as God 
wills ; for Luther too that is all ; Islam is all. 

Once, he looks out from his solitary Patmos, the Castle 
of Coburg, in the middle of the night : The great vault of 
Immensity, long flights of clouds sailing through it, — dumb, 
gaunt, huge: — who supports all that? "None ever saw 
the pillars of it; yet it is supported." God supports it. 
We must know that God is great, that God is good ; and 
trust, where we cannot see. — Returning home from Leipzig 
once, he is struck by the beauty of the harvest-fields : How 
it stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fair taper stem, its 
golden head bent, all rich and waving there, — the meek 
Earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once again ; 
the bread of man ! — In the garden at Wittenberg one even- 
ing at sunset, a little bird has perched for the night : That 
little bird, says Luther, above it are the stars and deep 
Heaven of worlds ; yet it has folded its little wings ; gone 
trustfully to rest there as in its home : the Maker of it has 

given it too a home ! Neither are mirthful turns wanting : 

there is a great free human heart in this man. The common 
speech of him has a rugged nobleness, idiomatic, expressive, 
genuine ; gleams here and there with beautiful poetic tints. 
One feels him to be a great brother man. His love of 



158 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Music, indeed, is not this, as it were, the summary of all 
these affections in him ? Many a wild unutterability he 
spoke forth from him in the tones of his flute. The Devils 
fled from his flute, he says. Death-defiance on the one 
hand, and such love of music on the other; I could call 
these the tv\^o opposite poles of a great soul ; between these 
two all great things had room. 

Luther's face is to me expressive of him ; in Kranach's 
best portraits I find the true Luther. A rude plebeian face ; 
with its huge crag-like brows and bones, the emblem of 
rugged energy; at first, almost a repulsive face. Yet in the 
eyes especially there is a wild silent sorrow ; an unnamable 
melancholy, the element of all gentle and fine affections ; 
giving to the rest the true stamp of nobleness. Laughter 
was in this Luther, as we said; but tears also were there. 
Tears also were appointed him; tears and hard toil. The 
basis of his life was Sadness, Earnestness. In his latter 
days, after all triumphs and victories, he expresses himself 
heartily weary of living; he considers that God alone can 
and will regulate the course things are taking, and that per- 
haps the Day of Judgment is not far. As for him, he longs 
for one thing: that God would release him from his labor, 
and let him depart and be at rest. They understafnd little 
of the man who cite this in ^^/jcredit of him ! — I will call 
this Luther a true Great Man ; great in intellect, in courage, 
affection and integrity ; one of our most lovable and pre- 
cious men. Great, not as a hewn obelisk ; but as an Alpine 
mountain, — so simple, honest, spontaneous, not setting up 
to be great at all ; there for quite another purpose than 
being great ! Ah yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and 
wide into the Heavens ; yet in the clefts of its fountains, 
green beautiful valleys with flowers ! A right Spiritual Hero 
and Prophet; once more, a true Son of Nature and Fact, 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. \% 

for whom these centuries, and many that are to come yet, 
will be thankful to Heaven. 

The most interesting phasis which the Reformation any- 
where assumes, especially for us English, is that of Puritan- 
ism. In Luther's own country Protestantism soon dwindled 
into a rather barren affair : not a religion or faith, but rather 
now a theological jangling of argument, the proper seat of 
it not the heart; the essence of it sceptical contention: 
which indeed has jangled more and more, down to Vol- 
taireism itself, — through Gustavus-Adolphus contentions 
onward to French-Revolution ones ! But in our Island 
there arose a Puritanism, which even got itself estabhshed 
as a Presbyterianism and National Church among the 
Scotch ; which came forth as a real business of the heart ; 
and has produced in the world very notable fruit. In some 
senses, one may say it is the only phasis of Protestantism 
that ever got to the rank of being a F'aith, a true heart- 
communication with Heaven, and of exhibiting itself in 
History as such. We must spare a few words for Knox ; 
himself a brave and remarkable man ; but still more impor- 
tant as Chief Priest and Founder, which one may consider 
him to be, of the Faith that became Scotland's, New Eng- 
land's, Oliver Cromwell's. History will have something to 
say about this, for some time to come ! 

We may censure Puritanism as we please ; and no one of 
us, I suppose, but would find it a very rough defective thing. 
But we, and all men, may understand that it was a genuine 
thing; for Nature has adopted it, and it has grown, and 
grows. I say sometimes, that all goes by wager-of-battle in 
this world; that strength^ well understood, is the measure 
of all worth. Give a thing time; if it can succeed, it is a 
right thing. Look now at American Saxondom ; and at that 
little Fact of the saihng of the Mayflower, two hundred years 



k 



l60 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

ago, from Delft Haven in Holland ! Were we of open sense 
as the Greeks were, we had found a Poem here; one of 
Nature's own Poems, such as she writes in broad facts over 
great continents. For it was properly the beginning of 
America: there were s: _ ' -^ settlers in America before, 
some material as of i. is there : but the soul of it was 

first this. These pci^r iv.e.., ariven out of their own countrv^ 
not able well to live in Holland, determine on setding in the 
New World- Black untamed forests are there, and wild 
savage creatures ; but not so cruel as Starchamber hangmen. 
They thought the Earth would 3deld them food, if they tilled 
honestly; the everlasting heaven would stretch, there too, 
overhead ; they should be left in peace, to prepare for Eter- 
nity by living well in this world of Time; worshipping in 
what they thought the true, not the idolatrous wa\'. They 
clubbed their small means together; hired a ship, the little 
ship Jilayflower, and made ready to set sail. 

In Neal's History of the Puritans * is an account of the 
ceremony of their departure: solemnit}-, we might call it 
rather, for it was a real act of worship. Their minister went 
down with them to the beach, and their brethren whom they 
were to leave behind ; all joined in solemn prayer, That God 
would have pity on His poor children, and go with them into 
that waste wilderness, for He also had made that. He was 
there also as weU as here. — Hah ! These men, I think, had 
a work ! The weak thing, weaker than a child, becomes 
strong one day, if it be a true thing. Puritanism was onl) 
despicable, laughable then ; but nobody can manage to 
laugh at it now. Puritanism has got weapons and sinews ; 
it has fire-arms, war-navies ; it has cunning in its ten fingers, 
strength in its right arm; it can steer ships, fell forests, 
remove mountains; — it is one of the strongest things 
under this sun at present \ 

* Feal (London, 1775), L 490. 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. l6l 

In the history of Scotland, too, I can find properly but one 
epoch : we may say, it contains nothing of world-interest at 
all but this Reformation by Knox. A poor barren coun- 
try, full of continual broils, dissensions, massacrings ; a 
people in the last state of rudeness and destitution, little 
better perhaps than Ireland at this day. Hungry fierce 
barons, not so much as able to form any arrangement with 
each other how to divide what they fleeced from these poor 
drudges; but obliged, as the Columbian Republics are at 
this day, to make of every alteration a revolution ; no way 
of changing a ministry but by hanging the old ministers on 
gibbets: this is a historical spectacle of no very singular 
significance! " Bravery " enough, I doubt not; fierce fight- 
ing in abundance : but not braver or fiercer than that of 
their old Scandinavian Sea-king ancestors ; whose exploits 
we have not found worth dwelling on ! It is a country as 
yet without a soul : nothing developed in it but what is rude, 
external, semi-animal. And now at the Reformation, the 
internal life is kindled, as it were, under the ribs of this 
outward material death. A cause, the noblest of causes, 
kindles itself, like a beacon set on high ; high as Heaven, 
yet attainable from Earth ; — whereby the meanest man 
becomes not a Citizen only, but a member of Christ's visible 
Church ; a veritable Hero, if he prove a true man ! 

Well ; this is what I mean by a whole " nation of heroes ; " 
a believing nation. There needs not a great soul to make a 
hero ; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to 
its origin ; that will be a great soul ! The like has been seen, 
we find. The like will be again seen, under wider forms 
than the Presbyterian : there can be no lasting good done 
till then. — Impossible ! say some. Possible ? Has it not 
been^ in this world, as a practised fact ? Did Hero-worship 
fr^il in Knox's case ? Or are we made of other clay now ? 



1 62 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Did the Westminster Confession of Faith add some new 
property to the soul of man? God made the soul of man. 
He did not doom any soul of man to live as a Hypothesis 
and Hearsay, in a world filled with such, and with the fatal 

work and fruit of such ! 

But to 'return: This that Knox did for his Nation, I say, 
we may really call a resurrection as from death. It was not 
a smooth business ; but it was welcome surely, and cheap at 
that price, had it been far rougher. On the whole, cheap 
at any price ; — as life is. The people began to live : they 
ineeded first of all to do that, at what cost and costs soever. 
Scotch Literature and Thought, Scotch Industry ; James 
Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns : I find 
Knox and the Reformation acting in the heart's core of 
every one of these persons and phenomena; I find that with- 
out the Reformation they would not have been. Or what 
of Scotland "i The Puritanism of Scotland became that of 
England, of New England. A tumult in the High Church of 
Edinburgh spread into a universal battle and struggle over 
all these realms; — there came out, after fifty years' strug- 
gling, what we all call the " Glorious Revolution," a Habeas 
Corpus Act, Free Parliaments, and much else! — Alas, is it 
not too true what we said, That many men in the van 
do always, like Russian soldiers, march into the ditch of 
Schweidnitz, and fill it up with their dead bodies, that the 
rear may pass over them dry shod, and gain the honor ? 
■How many earnest rugged Cromwells, Knoxes, poor peas- 
3,nt Covenanters, wrestling, battling for very life, in rough 
miry places, have to struggle, and suffer, and fall, greatly 
censured, befnired^ — before a beautiful Revolution of 
Eighty-eight can step over them in official pumps and silk 
stockings,, with universal three-times-three ! 
5t §e^ins tQ me hard measure that thi§ §gQtti§h man, now 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. 1 63 

after three hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit 
before the world ; intrinsically for having been, in such way 
as it was then possible to be, the bravest of all Scotchmen ! 
Had he been a poor Half-and-half, he could have crouched 
into the corner, like so many others ; Scotland had not been 
delivered ; and Knox had been without blame. He is the 
one Scotchman to whom, of all others, his country and the 
world owe a debt. He has to plead that Scotland would for- 
give him for having been worth to it any million " unblamable " 
Scotchmen that need no forgiveness ! He bared his breast 
to the battle ; had to row in French galleys, wander forlorn 
in exile, in clouds and storms ; was censured, shot at through 
his windows ; had a right sore fighting life : if this world 
were his place of recompense, he had made but a bad ven- 
ture of it. I cannot apologize for Knox. To him it is very 
indifferent, these two hundred and fifty years or more, what 
men say of him. But we, having got above all those details 
of his battle, and hving now in clearness on the fruits of his 
victory, we, for our own sake, ought to look through the 
rumors and controversies enveloping the man, into the man 
himself. 

For one thing, I will remark that this post of Prophet to 
his Nation was not of his seeking; Knox had lived forty 
years quietly obscure, before he became conspicuous. He 
was the son of poor parents ; had got a college education ; 
become a Priest ; adopted the Reformation, and seemed well 
content to guide his own steps by the light of it, nowise 
unduly intruding it on others. He had lived as Tutor in 
gentlemen's families ; preaching when any body of persons 
wished to hear his doctrine : resolute he to walk by the truth, 
and speak the truth when called to do it; not ambitious of 
more; not fancying himself capable of more. In this 
entirel)^ ob§gure waj he ha(^ reagh^4 the age of forty ; w^S 



164 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

with the small body of Reformers who were standing siege 
in St. Andrew's Castle, — when one day in their chapel, the 
Preacher after finishing his exhortation to these fighters in 
the forlorn hope, said suddenly, That there ought to be other 
speakers, that all men who had a priest's heart and gift in 
them ought now to speak; — which gifts and heart one of 
their own number, John Knox the name of him, had : Had 
he not ? said the Preacher, appealing to all the audience : 
what then is his duty ? The people answered affirmatively ; 
it was a criminal forsaking of his post, if such a man held 
the word that was in him silent. Poer Knox was obliged to 
stand up ; he attempted to reply; he could say no word; — 
burst into a flood of tears, and ran out. It is worth remem- 
bering, that scene. He was in grievous trouble for some 
days. He felt what a small faculty was his for this great 
work. He felt what a baptism he was called to be baptized 
withal. He " burst into tears." 

Our primary characteristic of a Hero, that he is sincere, 
applies emphatically to Knox. It is not denied anywhere 
that this, whatever might be his other qualities or faults, is 
among the truest of men. With a singular instinct he holds 
to the truth and fact ; the truth alone is there for him, the 
rest a mere shadow and deceptive nonentity. However 
feeble, forlorn, the reality may seem, on that and that only 
can he take his stand. In the Galleys of the River Loire, 
whither Knox and the others, after their Castle of St. 
Andrew's was taken, had been sent as Galley-slaves, — some 
officer or priest, one day, presented them an Image of the 
Virgin Mother, requiring that they, the blasphemous heretics, 
should do it reverence. Mother? Mother of God.-^ said 
Knox, when the turn came to him : This is no Mother of 
God : this is '■'■ 2i pented bredd,^'' — a piece of wood, I tell you 
with p^iat on it ! She is filter fgr swimming, \ thiok, than 



TI^E HERO As PRIEST. 165 

for being worshipped, added Knox ; and flung the thing into 
the river. It was not very cheap jesting there : but come of 
it what might, this thing to Knox was and must continue 
nothing other than the real truth; it was a pented bredd : 
worship it he would not. 

He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of 
courage; the Cause they had was the true one, and must 
and would prosper ; the whole world could not put it down. 
Reahty is of God's making ; it is alone strong. How many 
pented bredds, pretending to be real, are fitter to swim than 
to be worshipped ! — This Knox cannot live but by fact : he 
clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. He 
is an instance to us how a man, by sincerity itself, becomes 
heroic : it is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox a good 
honest intellectual talent, no transcendent one ; — a narrow, 
inconsiderable man, as compared with Luther : but in heart- 
felt instinctive adherence to truth, in sincerity^ as we say, he 
has no superior : nay, one might ask. What equal he has ? 
The heart of him is of the true Prophet cast. "He lies 
there," said the Earl of Morton at his grave, "who never 
feared the face of man." He resembles, more than any of 
the moderns, an Old-Hebrew Prophet. The same inflexi- 
bility, intolerance, rigid narrow-looking adherence to God's 
truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that forsake 
truth : an Old-Hebrew Prophet in the guise of an Edinburgh 
Minister of the Sixteenth Century. We are to take him for 
that ; not require him to be other. 

Knox's conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used 
to make in her own palace, to reprove her there, have been 
much commented upon. Such cruelty, such coarseness, fills 
us with indignation. On reading the actual narrative of the 
business, what Knox said, and what Knox meant, I must say 
one's tragic feeling is rather disappointed. They are not so 



1 66 LECTURES ON- HEROES. 

coarse, these speeches ; they seem to me about as fine as 
the circumstances would permit ! Knox was not there to do 
the courtier ; he came on another errand. Whoever, reading 
these colloquies of his with the Queen, thinks they are 
vulgar insolences of a plebeian priest to a delicate high lady, 
mistakes the purport and essence of them altogether. It 
was unfortunately not possible to be polite with the Queen of 
Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the Nation and Cause 
of Scotland. .A man who did not wish to see the land of his 
birth made a hunting-field for intriguing ambitious Guises, 
and the Cause of God trampled underfoot of Falsehoods, 
Formulas and the Devil's Cause, had no method of making 
himself agreeable ! " Better that women weep," said Morton, 
" than that bearded men be forced to weep." Knox was the 
constitutional opposition-party in Scotland : the nobles of 
the country, called by their station to take that post, were 
not found in it ; Knox had to go, or no one. The hapless 
Queen ; — but the still more hapless Country, if she were 
made happy ! Mary herself was not without sharpness 
enough, among her other qualities : " Who are you," said 
she once, " that presume to school the nobles and sovereign 
of this realm ? " — " Madam, a subject born within the same," 
answered he. Reasonably answered ! If the " subject " have 
truth to speak, it is not the "subject's " footing that will fail 
him here. 

We blame Knox for his intolerance. Well, surely it is 
good that each of us be as tolerant as possible. Yet, at 
bottom, after all the talk there is and has been about it, 
what is tolerance ? Tolerance has to tolerate the unes- 
sential ; and to see well what that is. Tolerance has to be 
noble, measured, just in its very wrath, when it can tolerate 
no longer. But, on the whole, we are not altogether here to 
tolerate ! We are here to resist, to control and vanquish 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. 1 6/ 

withal. We do not "tolerate" Falsehoods, Thieveries, In- 
iquities, when they fasten on us ; we say to them. Thou art 
false, thou art not tolerable ! We are here to extinguish False- 
hoods, and put an end to them, in some wise way ! I will not 
quarrel so much with the way ; the doing of the thing is our 
great concern. In this sense Knox was, full surely, intolerant. 
A man sent to row in French Galleys, and suchlike, for 
teaching the Truth in his own land, cannot always be in the 
mildest humor ! I am not prepared to say that Knox had a 
soft temper; nor do I know that he had what we call an 
ill temper. An ill nature he decidedly had not. Kind honest 
affections dwelt in the much-enduring, hard-worn, ever- 
battling man. That he could rebuke Queens, and had such 
weight among those proud turbulent Nobles, proud enough 
whatever else they were; and could maintain to the end 
a kind of virtual Presidency and Sovereignty in that wild 
realm, he who was only "a subject born within the same:" 
this of itself will prove to us that he was found, close at 
hand, to be no mean acrid man ; but at heart a heathful, 
strong, sagacious man. Such alone can bear rule in that 
kind. They blame him for pulling down cathedrals, and 
so forth, as if he were a seditious rioting demagogue : 
precisely the reverse is seen to be the fact, in regard to 
cathedrals and the rest of it, if we examine ! Knox wanted 
no puUing-down of stone edifices ; he wanted leprosy and 
darkness to be thrown out of the lives of men. Tumult was 
not his element; it was the tragic feature of his life that he 
was forced to dwell so much in that. Every such man is 
the born enemy of Disorder ; hates to be in it : but what 
then.? Smooth Falsehood is not order; it is the general 
sum-total of Z^/j-order. Order is Truth., — each thing stand- 
ing on the basis that belongs to it : Order and Falsehood 
cannot subsist together.- 



i6S lfxtVres on- PIEROES, 

Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knox has a vein of 
drollery in him ; which I like much, in combination with his 
other qualities. He has a true eye for the ridiculous. His 
History, with its rough earnestness, is curiously enlivened 
with this. When the two Prelates, entering Glasgow Cathe- 
dral, quarrel about precedence ; march rapidly up, take to 
hustling one another, twitching one another's rochets, and 
at last flourishing their crosiers like quarter-staves, it is a 
great sight for him every way ! Not mockery, scorn, bitter- 
ness alone; though there is enough of that too. But a true, 
loving, illuminating laugh mounts up over the earnest visage; 
not a loud laugh ; you would say, a laugh in the eyes most 
of all. An honest-hearted, brotherly man ; brother to the 
high, brother also to the low; sincere in his sympathy with 
both. He had his pipe of Bordeaux too, we find, in that old 
Edinburgh house of his ; a cheery social man, with faces 
that loved him ! They go far wrong who think this Knox 
was a gloomy, spasmodic, shrieking fanatic. Not at all : he 
is one of the solidest of men. Practical, cautious-hopeful, 
patient; a most shrewd, observing, quietly discerning man. 
In fact, he has very much the type of character we assign to 
the Scotch at present : a certain sardonic taciturnity is in 
him ; insight enough ; and a stouter heart than he himself 
knows of. He has the power of holding his peace over 
many things which do not vitally concern him, — "They? 
what are they?" But the thing which does vitally concern 
him, that thing he will speak of; and in a tone the whole 
world shall be made to hear: all the more emphatic for his 
long silence. 

This Prophet of the Scotch is to me no hateful man ! — He 
had a sore fight of an existence : wrestling with Popes and 
Principalities ; in defeat, contention, lifelong struggle ; row- 
ing as a galley-slave, wandering as an exile. A sore fight: 



TflE HERO AS PRinst. 1 69 

but he won it. " Have you hope ? " they asked him in his 
last moment, when he could no longer speak. He lifted his 
finger, "pointed upwards with his finger," and so died. 
Honor to him ! His works have not died. The letter of 
his work dies, as of all men's ; but the spirit of it never. 

One word more as to the letter of Knox's work. The un- 
forgivable offence in him is, that he wished to set up Priests 
over the head of Kings. In other words, he strove to make 
the Government of Scotland a Theocracy. This indeed is 
properly the sum of his offences, the essential sin ; for which 
what pardon can there be ? It is most true, he did, at bottom, 
consciously or unconsciously, mean a Theocracy, or Govern- 
ment of God. He did mean that Kings and Prime Ministers, 
and all manner of persons, in public or private, diplomatising 
or whatever else they might be doing, should walk according 
to the Gospel of Christ, and understand that this was their 
Law, supreme over all laws. He hoped once to see such a 
thing realized ; and the Petition, Thy Kingdom cof/te, no 
longer an empty word. He was sore grieved when he saw 
greedy worldly Barons clutch hold of the Church's property; 
when he expostulated that it was not secular property, that 
it was spiritual property, and should be turned to trtie 
churchly uses, education, schools, worship; — and the Re- 
gent Murray had to answer, with a shrug of the shoulders, 
" It is a devout imagination ! " This was Knox's scheme of 
right and truth ; this he zealously endeavored after, to real- 
ize it. If we think his scheme of truth was too narrow, was 
not true, we may rejoice that he could not realize it ; that it 
remained after two centuries of effort, unrealizable, and is a 
" devout imagination " still. But how shall we blame hzjn 
for struggling to realize it? Theocracy, Government of 
God, is precisely the thing to be struggled for! All 
Prophets, zealous Priests, are there for that purpose. 



170 LECTURES ON- HEROES. 

Hildebrand wished a Theocracy ; Cromwell wished it, fought 
for it ; Mahomet attained it. Nay, is it not what all zealous 
men, whether called Priests, Prophets, or whatsoever else 
called, do essentially wish, and must wish ? That right and 
truth, or God's Law, reign supreme among men, this is the 
Heavenly Ideal (well named in Knox's time, and namable 
in all times, a revealed " Will of God ") towards which the 
Reformer will insist that all be more and more approximated. 
All true Reformers, as I said, are by the nature of them 
Priests, and strive for a Theocracy. 

How far such Ideals can ever be introduced into Practice, 
and at what point our impatience with their non-introduction 
ought to begin, is always a question. I think we may say 
safely, Let them introduce themselves as far as they can con- 
trive to do it ! If they are the true faith of men, all men ought 
to be more or less impatient always where they are not found 
introduced. There will never be wanting Regent-Murrays 
enough to shrug their shoulders, and say, "A devout imagi- 
nation ! " We will praise the Hero-priest rather, who does 
what is in him to bring them in ; and wears out, in toil, cal- 
umny, contradiction, a noble life, to make a God's Kingdom 
of this Earth. The Earth will not become too godlike ! 



Tim HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 17I 



I 



LECTURE V. 

THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, 

BURNS. 

[ Tuesday, iqth May, 1840.] 

HERO-GODS, Prophets, Poets, Priests, are forms of 
Heroism that belong to the old ages, make their 
appearance in the remotest times ; some of them have ceased 
to be possible long since, and cannot any more show them- 
selves in this world. The Hero as Man of Letters, again, of 
which class we are to speak to-day, is altogether a product 
of these new ages ; and so long as the wondrous art of 
Writing, or of Ready-writing which we call Printing, sub- 
sists, he may be expected to continue, as one of the main 
forms of Heroism for all future ages. He is, in various 
respects, a very singular phenomenon. 

He is new, I say ; he has hardly lasted above a century in 
the world yet. Never, till about a hundred years ago, was 
there seen any figure of a Great Soul living apart in that 
anomalous manner ; endeavoring to speak forth the inspira- 
tion that was in him by Printed Books, and find place and sub- 
sistence by what the world would please to give him for doing 
that. Much had been sold and bought, and left to make its 
own bargain in the marketplace ; but the inspired wisdom of 
a Heroic Soul never till then, in that naked manner. He, 
with his copy-rights and copy-wrongs, in his squalid garret, 



1 7^ LECTURES ON- HEROES. 

in his rusty coat ; ruling (for this is what he does), from hi^ 
grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would, 
or would not, give him bread while living, — is a rather 
curious spectacle ! Few shapes of Heroism can be more 
unexpected. 

Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into 
strange shapes : the world knows not well at any time what 
to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world ! It 
seemed absurd to us, that men, in their rude admiration, 
should take some wise great Odin for a god, and worship 
him as such ; some wise great Mahomet for one god-inspired, 
and religiously follow his Law for twelve centuries : but 
that a wise great Johnson, a Burns, a Rousseau, should be 
taken for some idle nondescript, extant in the world to amuse 
idleness, and have a few coins and applauses thrown him, 
that he might live thereby ; this perhaps, as before hinted, 
will one day seem a still absurder phasis of things ! — Mean- 
while, since it is the spiritual always that determines the 
material, this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as 
our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, 
is the soul of all. What he teaches, the whole world will do 
and make. The world's manner of dealing with him is the 
most significant feature of the world's general position. 
Looking well at his life, we may get a glance, as deep as isi 
readily possible for us, into the life of those singular centu- 
ries which have produced him, in which we ourselves live and 
work. 

There are genuine Men of Letters, and not genuine ; as 
in every kind there is a genuine and a spurious. If Hero be 
taken to mean genuine, then I say the Hero as Man of 
Letters will be found discharging a function for us which is 
ever honorable, ever the highest; and was once well known 
to be the highest. He is uttering forth, in such way as he 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 1/3 

has, the inspired soul of him; all that a man, in any case, 
can do. I say inspii'ed; for what we call "originality," 
"sincerity," " genius," the heroic quality we have no good 
name for, signifies that. The Hero is he who lives in the 
inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, 
which exists always, unseen to most, under the Temporary, 
Trivial : his being is in that ; he declares that abroad, by 
act or speech as it may be, in declaring himself abroad. 
His life, as we said before, is a piece of the everlasting heart 
of Nature herself : all men's hfe is, — but the weak many 
know not the fact, and are untrue to it, in most times ; the 
strong few are strong, heroic, perennial, because it cannot 
be hidden from them. The Man of Letters, like every Hero, 
is there to proclaim this in such sort as he can. Intrinsi- 
cally it is the same function which the old generations named 
a man Prophet, Priest, Divinity, for doing; which all manner 
of Heroes, by speech or by act, are sent into the world to do. 
Fichte the German Philosopher delivered, some forty 
years ago at Erlangen, a highly remarkable Course of Lec- 
tures on this subject : " Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten., On 
the Nature of the Literary Man." Fichte, in conformity 
with the Transcendental Philosophy, of which he was a 
distinguished teacher, declares first: That all things which 
we see or work with in this Earth, especially we ourselves 
and all persons, are as a kind of vesture or sensuous Appear- 
ance : that under all there lies, as the essence of them, what 
he calls the " Divine Idea of the World ; " this is the ReaHty 
w^hich " lies at the bottom of all Appearance." To the mass 
of men no such Divine Idea is recognizable in the world ; 
they live merely, says Fichte, among the superficialities, 
practicalities and shows of the world, not dreaming that 
there is any thing divine under them. But the Man of 
J^etter§ i§ gent hither specially th^t he may discern foif 



1/4 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

himself, and make manifest to us, this same Divine Idea: 
in every new generation it will manifest itself in a new 
dialect ; and he is there for the purpose of doing that. Such 
is Fichte's phraseology; with which we need not quarrel. 
It is his way of naming what I here, by other words, am 
striving imperfectly to name ; what there is at present no 
name for : The unspeakable Divine Significance, full of 
splendor, of wonder and terror, that lies in the being of every 
man, of every thing, — the Presence of the God who made 
every man and thing. Mahomet taught this in his dialect ; 
Odin in his : it is the thing which all thinking hearts, in one 
dialect or another, are here to teach. 

. Fichte calls the Man of Letters, therefore, a Prophet, or 
as he prefers to phrase it, a Priest, continually unfolding 
the Godlike to men : Men of Letters are a perpetual Priest- 
hood, from age to age, teaching all men that a God is still 
present in their life ; that all " Appearance," whatsoever 
we see in the world, is but as a vesture for the " Divine 
Idea of the World," for " that which Hes at the bottom of 
Appearance." In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, 
acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness : he is the 
light of the world; the world's Priest: — guiding it, like a 
sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the 
waste of Time. Fichte discriminates with sharp zeal the 
t7'2ie Literary Man, what we here call the Hero as Man of 
Letters, from multitudes of false unheroic. Whoever lives 
not wholly in this Divine Idea, or living partially in it, 
struggles not, as for the one good, to live wholly in it, — he 
is, let him live where else he like, in what* pomps and pros- 
perities he like, no Literary Man ; he is, says Fichte, a 
" Bungler, Stiimper.^'' Or at best, if he belong to the pro- 
saic provinces, he may., be a " Hodman ; " Fichte even calls 
him elsewhere a " Nonentity," and h^s in short no mercy 



1 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 1 75 

for him, no wish that he should continue happy among us ! 
This is P^ichte's notion of the Man of Letters. It means, 
in its own form, precisely what we here mean. 

In this point of view, I consider that, for the last hundred 
years, by far the notablest of all Literary Men is Fichte's 
countryman, Goethe. To that man too, in a strange way, 
there was given what we may call a life in the Divine Idea 
of the World ; vision of the inward divine mystery : and 
strangely, out of his Books, the world rises imaged once 
more as godlike, the workmanship and temple of a God. 
Illuminated all, not in fierce impure fire-splendor as of 
Mahomet, but in mild celestial radiance ; — really a Proph- 
ecy in these most unprophetic times ; to my mind, by far 
the greatest, though one of the quietest, among all the 
great things that have come to pass in them. Our chosen 
specimen of the Hero as Literary Man would be this Goethe. 
And it were a very pleasant plan for me here to discourse 
of his heroism: for I consider him to be a true Hero; 
heroic in what he said and did, and perhaps still more in 
what he did not say and did not do ; to me a noble spec- 
tacle: a great heroic ancient man, speaking and keeping 
silence as an ancient Hero, in the guise of a most modern, 
high-bred, high-cultivated Man of Letters ! We have had 
no such spectacle ; no man capable of affording such, for 
the last hundred and fifty years. 

But at present, such is the general state of knowledge 
about Goethe, it were worse than useless to attempt speak- 
ing of him in this case. Speak as I might, Goethe, to the 
great majority of you, would remain problematic, vague ; no 
impression but a false one could be realized. Him we must 
leave to future times. Johnson, Burns, Rousseau, three 
great figures from a prior time, from a far inferior state of 
circumstances, will suit vis better here. Three i^en of t|i^ 



176 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Eighteenth Century ; the conditions of their life far more 
resemble what those of ours still are in England, than what 
Goethe's in Germany were. Alas, these men did not con- 
quer like him ; they fought bravely, and fell. They were 
not heroic bringers of the hght, but heroic seekers of it. 
They lived under galling conditions ; struggling as under 
mountains of impediment, and could not unfold themselves 
into clearness, or victorious interpretation of that " Divine 
Idea." It is rather the Tombs of three Literary Heroes that 
I have to show you. There are the monumental heaps, 
under which three spiritual giants lie buried. Very mourn- 
ful, but also great and full of interest for us. We will 
linger by them for a while. 

Complaint is often made, in these times, of what we call 
the disorganized condition of society: how ill many arranged 
forces of society fulfil their work; how many powerful forces^ 
are seen working in a wasteful, chaotic, altogether unarranged 
manner. It is too just a complaint, as we all know. But 
perhaps if we look at this of Books and the Writers of 
Books, we shall find here, as it were, the summary of all 
other disorganization; — a sort of heart, from which, and to 
which, all other confusion circulates in the world ! Consid- 
ering what Book-writers do in the world, and what the world 
does with Book-writers, I should say, It is the most anoma- 
lous thing the world at present has to show. — We should 
get into a sea far beyond sounding, did we attempt to give 
account of this : but we must glance at it for the sake of our 
subject. The worst element in the life of these three Liter- 
ary Heroes was, that they found their business and position 
such a chaos. On the beaten road there is tolerable travel- 
ling ; but it is sore work, and many have to perishj fashioning 
a path through the impassable ! 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. I// 

Our pious Fathers, feeling well what importance lay in the 
speaking of man to men, founded churches, made endow- 
ments, regulations ; everywhere in the civilized world there 
is a Pulpit, environed with all manner of complex dignified 
appurtenances and furtherances, that therefrom a man with 
the tongue may, to best advantage, address his fellow-men. 
They felt that this was the most important thing; that with- 
out this there was no good thing. It is a right pious work, 
that of theirs ; beautiful to behold ! But now with the art of 
Writing, with the art of Printing, a total change has come 
over that business. The Writer of a Book, is not he a 
Preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or 
that, but to all men in all times and places ? Surely it is of 
the last importance that he do his work right, whoever do it 
wrong; — that the eye report not falsely, for then all the 
other members are astray ! Well ; how he may do his work, 
^whether he do it right or wrong, or do it at all, is a point 
which no man in the world has taken the pains to think of. 
To a certain shopkeeper, trying to get some money for his 
books, if lucky, he is of some importance ; to no other man 
of any. Whence he came, whither he is bound, by what 
ways he arrived, by what he might be furthered on his course, 
no one asks. He is an accident in society. He wanders 
like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as the spirit- 
ual light, either the guidance or the misguidance ! 

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all 
things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first form 
of the work of a Hero ; Books, written words, are still mirac- 
ulous Runes, the latest form ! In Books lies the soul oi the 
whole Past Time ; the articulate audible voice of the Past, 
when the body and material substance of it has altogether 
vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors 
and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined, — they 



178 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

are precious, great : but what do they become ? Agamemnon, 
the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is 
gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks 
and blocks : but the Books of Greece ! There Greece, to 
every thinker, still very literally lives ; can be called up again 
into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that 
Mankind has done, thought, gained or been : it is lying as 
in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the 
chosen possession of men. ) 

Do not Books still accomplish jnzracies, as Runes were 
fabled to do? They persuade men. Not the wretchedest, 
circulating-library novel, which foolish girls thumb and con 
in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual prac- 
tical weddings and households of those foolish girls. So 
" Celia " felt, so " Clifford " acted : the foolish Theorem of 
Life, stamped into those young brains, comes out as a solid 
Practice one day. Consider whether any Rune in the wild- 
est imagination of Mythologist ever did such wonders as, on 
the actual firm Earth, some Books have done ! What built 
St. Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart of the matter, it 
was that divine Hebrew Book, — the word partly of the man 
Moses, an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds, four thou- 
sand years ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai ! It is the stran- 
gest of things, yet nothing is truer. With the art of Writing, 
of which Printing is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively 
insignificant corollary, the true reign of miracles for mankind 
commenced. It related, with a wondrous new contiguity 
and perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with the Pres- 
ent in time and place ; all times and all places with this our 
actual Here and Now. All things were altered for men; 
all modes of important work of men : teaching, preaching, 
governing, and all else. 

To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a 



4 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 1 79 

notable, respectable product of the modern ages. Their 
existence too is modified, to the very basis of it, by the 
existence of Books. Universities arose while there were 
yet no Books procurable ; while a man, for a single Book, 
had to give an estate of land. That, in those circumstances, 
when a man had some knowledge to communicate, he 
should do it by gathering the learners round him, face to 
face, was a necessity for him. If you wanted to know what 
Abelard knew, you must go and listen to Abelard. Thou- 
sands, as many as thirty thousand, went to hear Abelard and 
that metaphysical theology of his. And now for any other 
teacher who had also something of his own to teach, there 
was a great convenience opened : so many thousands eager 
to learn were already assembled yonder ; of all places the 
best place for him was that. For any third teacher it was 
better still ; and grew ever the better, the more teachers 
there came. It only needed now that the King took notice 
of this new phenomenon ; combined or agglomerated the 
various schools into one school; gave it edifices, privileges, 
encouragements, and named it Universitas^ or School of all 
Sciences : the University of Paris, in its essential characters, 
was there. The model of all subsequent Universities ; 
which down even to these days, for six centuries now, have 
gone on to found themselves. Such, I conceive, was the 
origin of Universities. 

It is clear, however, that with this simple circumstance, 
facihty of getting Books, the whole conditions of the busi- 
ness from top to bottom were changed. Once invent Print- 
ing, you metamorphosed all Universities, or superseded 
them.' The Teacher needed not now to gather men person- 
ally round him, that he might speak to them what he knew : 
print it in a Book, and all learners far and wide, for a trifle, 
had it each at his own fireside, much more effectually to 



l8o LECTURES ON HEROES. 

learn it ! — Doubtless there is still peculiar virtue in Speech ; 
even writers of Books may still, in some circumstances, find 
it convenient to speak also, — witness our present meeting 
here ! There is, one would say, and must ever remain while 
man has a tongue, a distinct province for Speech as well as 
for Writing and Printing. In regard to all things this must 
remain; to Universities among others. But the hmits of 
the two have nowhere yet been pointed out, ascertained ; 
much less put in practice : the University which would com- 
pletely take in that great new fact, of the existence of 
Printed Books, and stand on a clear footing for the Nine- 
teenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth, has 
not yet come into existence. If we think of it, all that a 
University, or final highest School can do for us, is still but 
what the first School began doing, — teach us to read. We 
learn to read, in various languages, in various sciences; we 
learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of Books. But 
the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic 
knowledge, is the Books themselves ! It depends on what 
we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best 
for us. The true University of these days is a Collection 
of Books. 

But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is 
changed, in its preaching, in its working, by the introduction 
of Books. The Church is the working recognized Union of 
our Priests or Prophets, of those who by wise teaching 
guide the souls of men. While there was no Writing, even 
while there was no Easy-writing or Printing, the preaching 
of the voice was the natural sole method of performing this. 
But now with Books ! — He that can write a true Book, to 
persuade England, is not he the Bishop and Archbishop, 
the Primate of England and of All England ? I many a time 
say, the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, 



THE HERO AS MAA^ OE LETTERS. l8l 

these are the real working effective Church of a modern 
country. Nay not only our preaching, but even our wor- 
ship, is not it too accomplished by means of Printed Books ? 
The noble sentiment which a gifted soul has clothed for us 
in melodious words, which brings melody into our hearts, — 
is not this essentially, if we will understand it, of the nature 
of worship? There are many, in all countries, who, in this 
confused time, have no other method of worship. He who, 
in any way, shows us better than we knew before that a 
lily of the fields is beautiful, does he not show it us as an 
effluence of the Fountain of all Beauty ; as the handwritings 
made visible there, of the great Maker of the Universe ? 
He has sung for us, made us sing with him, a little verse of 
a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How much more he who 
sings, who says, or in any way brings home to our heart the 
noble doings, feelings, darings and endurances of a brother 
man ! He has verily touched our hearts as with a live coal 
from the altar. Perhaps there is no worship more authentic. 
Literature, so far^as it is Literature, is an " apocalypse of 
Nature," a revealing of the "open secret." It may well 
enough be named, in Fichte's style, a " continuous revela- 
tion" of the Godlike in the Terrestrial and Common. The 
Godlike does ever, in very truth, endure there ; is brought 
•out, now in this dialect, now in that, with various degrees 
of clearness : all true gifted Singers and Speakers are, 
consciously or unconsciously, doing so. The dark stormful 
indignation of a Byron, so wayward and perverse, may have 
touches of it; nay the withered mockery of a French sceptic, 
— his mockery of the False, a love and worship of the True. 
How much more the sphere-harmony of a Shakspeare, of a 
Goethe ; the cathedral-music of a Milton ! They are some- 
thing too, those humble genuine lark-notes of a Burns, — 
skylark, starting from the humble furrow, far overhead into 



1 82 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

the blue depths, and singing to us so genuinely there ! For 
all true singing is of the nature of worship ; as indeed all 
true working may be said to be, — whereof such singing 
is but the record, and fit melodious representation, to us. 
Fragments of a real " Church Liturgy " and " Body of 
Homilies," strangely disguised from the common eye, are 
to be found weltering in that huge froth-ocean of Printed 
Speech we loosely call Literature ! Books are our Church 
too. 

Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenage- 
mote, old Parliament, was a great thing. The affairs of the^ 
nation were there deliberated and decided ; what we were to 
do as a nation. But does not, though the name Parliament 
subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere 
and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, oict 
of Parliament altogether.? Burke said there were Three 
Estates in Parhament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, 
there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. 
It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a lite^al:- 
fact, — very momentous to us in these times. Literature is 
our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out 
of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy • invent 
Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing brings Printing; 
brings universal every-day extempore Printing, as we see at 
present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole 
nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with 
inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It 
matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures : 
the requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which others 
will listen to ; this and nothing more is requisite. The 
nation is governed by all that has tongue in the nation : 
Democracy is virtually there. Add only, that whatsoever 
power exists will have itself, by and by, organized ; working; 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 1 83 

secretly under bandages, obscurations, obstructions, it will 
never rest till it get to work free, unencumbered, visible to 
all. Democracy virtually extant will insist on becoming 
palpably extant. 

On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of 
the things which man can do or make here below, by far the 
most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we 
call Books ! Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on 
them; — from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew 
Book, what have they not done, what are they not doing ! — 
For indeed, whatever be the outward form of the thing (bits 
of paper, as we say, and black ink), is it not verily, at bottom, 
the highest act of man's faculty that produces a Book ? It 
is the Thotight of man ; the true thaumaturgic virtue ; by 
which man works all things whatsoever. All that he does, 
and brings to pass, is the vesture of a Thought. This 
London City, with 'all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, 
cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what 
is it but a Thought, but milHons of Thoughts made into One; 
— a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in 
brick, in iron, smoke, dust. Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney 
Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it ! Not a brick 
was made but some man had to think of the making of that 
brick. — The thing we called " bits of paper with traces of 
black ink," is the purest embodiment a Thought of man can 
have. No wonder it is, in all ways, the activest and noblest. 

All this, of the importance and supreme importance of the 
Man of Letters in modern Society, and how the Press is to 
such a degree superseding the Pulpit, the Senate, the Senaius 
Academicus and much else, has been admitted for a good 
while ; and recognized often enough, in late times, with a 
sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. It seems to 
me, the Sentimental by and by will have to give place to the 



1^4 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Practical. If Men of Letters are so incalculably influential, 
actually performing such work for us from age to age, and 
even from day to day, then I think we may conclude that 
Men of Letters will not always wander like unrecognized 
unregulated Ishmaelites among us ! Whatsoever thing, as I 
said above, has virtual unnoticed power will cast off its wrap- 
pages, bandages, and step forth one day with palpably artic- 
ulated, universally visible power. That one man wear the 
clothes, and take the wages, of a function which is done by 
quite another : there can be no profit in this ; this is not right, 
it is wrong. And yet, alas, the making of it right, — what a 
business, for long times to come ! Sure enough, this that 
we call Organization of the Literary Guild is still a great way 
off, incumbered with all manner of complexities. If you 
asked me what were the best possible organization for the 
Men of Letters in modern society ; the arrangement of fur- 
therance and regulation, grounded the most accurately on the 
actual facts of their position and of the world's position, — I 
should beg to say that the problem far exceeded my faculty ! 
It is not one man's faculty; it is that of many successive men 
turned earnestly upon it, that will bring out even an approxi- 
mate solution. What the best arrangement were, none of us 
could say. But if you ask. Which is the worst ? I answer : 
This which we now have, that Chaos should sit umpire in it ; 
this is the worst. To the best, or any good one, there is yet 
a long way. 

One remark I must not omit. That royal or parliamentary 
grants of money are by no means the chief thing wanted ! 
To give our Men of Letters stipends, endowments and all 
furtherance of cash, will do little towards the business. On 
the whole, one is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of 
money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is no 
evil to be poor ; that there ought to be Literary Men poor, 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 1 85 

— to show whether they are genuine or not! Mendicant 
Orders, bodies of good men doomed to beg^ were instituted 
in the Christian Church ; a most natural and even neces- 
sary development of the spirit of Christianity. It was itself 
founded on Poverty, on Sorrow, Contradiction, Crucifixion, 
every species of worldly Distress and Degradation. We may 
say, that he who has not known those things, and learned 
from them the priceless lessons they have to teach, has 
missed a good opportunity of schoohng. To beg, and go 
barefoot, in coarse woollen cloak with a rope round your loins, 
and be despised of all the world, was no beautiful business; 

— nor an honorable one in any eye, till the nobleness of 
those who did so had made it honored of some ! 

Begging is not in our course at the present time : but for 
the rest of it, who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the 
better for being poor? It is needful for him, at all rates, to 
know that outward profit, that success of any kind, is not the 
goal he has to aim at. Pride, vanity, ill-conditioned egoism 
of all sorts, are bred in his heart, as in every heart ; need, 
above all, to be cast out of his heart, — to be, with whatever 
pangs, torn out of it, cast forth from it, as a thing worthless. 
Byron, born rich and noble, made out even less than Burns, 
poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that same " best pos- 
sible organization " as yet far off. Poverty may still enter as 
an important element? What if our Men of Letters, men 
setting up to be Spiritual Heroes, were still then^ as they 
now are, a kind of "involuntary monastic order;" bound 
still to this same ugly Poverty, — till they had tried what 
was in it too, till they had learned to make it too do for them ! 
Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We 
must know the province of it, and confine it there ; and even 
spurn it back, when it wishes to get farther. 

Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season 



1 86 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

for them, the fit assigner of them, all settled, — how is the 
Burns to be recognized that merits these ? He must pass 
through the ordeal, and prove himself. This ordeal ; this 
wild welter of a chaos which is called Literary Life : this 
too is a kind of ordeal ! There is clear truth in the idea 
that a struggle from the lower classes of society, towards 
the upper regions and rewards of society, must ever con- 
tinue. Strong men are born there, who ought to stand else- 
where than there. The manifold, inextricably complex, 
universal struggle of these constitutes, and must constitute, 
what is called the progress of society. For Men of Letters, 
as for all other sorts of men. How to regulate that struggle ? 
There is the whole question. To leave it as it is, at the 
mercy of blind Chance ; a whirl of distracted atoms, one can- 
celling the other ; one of the thousand arriving saved, nine 
hundred and ninety-nine lost by the way; your royal Johnson 
languishing inactive in garrets, or harnessed to the yoke of 
Printer Cave ; your Burns dying broken-hearted as a Ganger ; 
your Rousseau driven into mad exasperation, kindling French 
Revolutions by his paradoxes: this, as we said, is clearly 
enough the worst regulation. The best^ alas, is far from us ! 
And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming ; advan- 
cing on us, as yet hidden in the bosom of centuries : this is 
a prophecy one can risk. For so soon as men get to discern 
the importance of a thing, they do infallibly set about arran- 
ging it, facilitating, forwarding it ; and rest not till, in some 
approximate degree, they have accomplished that. I say, of 
all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes, at present 
extant in the world, there is no class comparable for impor- 
tance to that Priesthood of the Writers of Books. This is a 
fact which he who runs may read, — and draw inferences 
from. " Literature will take care of itself," answered Mr. 
Pitt, when applied to for some help for Burns. "Yes," adds 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 1 8/ 

Mr. Southey, "it will take care of itself; and of you too, if 
you do not look to it ! " 

The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momen- 
tous one : they are but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction 
of the great body ; they can struggle on, and live or else die, 
as they have been wont. But it deeply concerns the whole 
society, whether it will set its light on high places, to walk 
thereby ; or trample it under foot, and scatter it in all ways 
of wild waste (not without conflagration), as heretofore ! 
Light is the one thing wanted for the world. Put wisdom in 
the head of the world, the world will fight its battle victo- 
riously, and be the best world man can make it. I call this 
anomaly of a disorganic Literary Class the heart of all other 
anomalies, at once product and parent ; some good arrange- 
ment for that would be as the piinctuin saliens of a new 
vitality and just arrangement for all. Already, in some 
European countries, in P^ ranee, in Prussia, one traces some 
beginnings of an arrangement for the Literary Class ; indi- 
cating the gradual possibility of such. I believe that it is 
possible ; that it will have to be possible. 

By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese 
is one on which we cannot arrive at clearness, but which 
excites endless curiosity even in the dim state : this namely, 
that they do attempt to make their Men of Letters their 
Governors ! It would be rash to say, one understood how 
this was done, or with what degree of success it was done. 
All such things must be very ^///successful ; yet a small degree 
of success is precious ; the very attempt how precious ! 
There does seem to be, all over China, a more or less active 
search everywhere to discover the men of talent that grow up 
in the young generation. Schools there are for every one : 
a foolish sort of training, yet still a sort. The youths who 
distinguish themselves in the lower school are promoted 



f 



1 88 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

into favorable stations in the higher, that they may stiM 
more distinguish theinselves, — forward and forward: it 
appears to be out of these that the Official Persons and 
incipient Governors are taken. These are they whom they 
try first, whether they can govern or not. And surely with 
the best hope : for they are the men that have already shown 
intellect. Try them : they have not governed or adminis- 
tered as yet ; perhaps they cannot; but there is no doubt 
they have some Understanding, — without which no man 
can ! Neither is Understanding a tool, as we are too apt to 
figure ; " it is a hand which can handle any tool." Try 
these men : they are of all others the best worth trying. — i 
Surely there is no kind of government, constitution, revolu- 
tion, social apparatus or arrangement, that I know of in 
this world, so promising to one's scientific curiosity as this. 
The man of intellect at the top of affairs : this is the aim of 
all constitutions and revolutions, if they have any aim. For 
the man of true intellect, as I assert and believe always, is 
the noblehearted man withal, the true, just, humane and 
valiant man. Get him for a governor, all is got ; fail to get 
him, though you had Constitutions plentiful as blackberries, 
and a Parliament in every village, there is nothing yet got ! 

These things look strange, truly ; and are not such as we 
commonly speculate upon. But we are fallen into strange 
times ; these things will require to be speculated upon ; to 
be rendered practicable, to be in some way put in practice. 
These, and many others. On all hands of us, there is the 
announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire of Rou- 
tine has ended; that to say a thing has long been, is no 
reason for its continuing to be. The things which have 
been are fallen into decay, are fallen into incompetence; 
large masses of mankind, in every society of our Europe, 
are no longer capable of living at all by the things which 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 1 89 

have been. When millions of men can no longer by their 
utmost exertion gain food for themselves, and "the third 
man for thirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate 
potatoes," the things which have been must decidedly pre- 
pare to alter themselves! — I will now quit this of the 
organization of Men of Letters. 

Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary 
Heroes of ours was not the want of organization for Men 
of Letters, but a far deeper one ; out of which, indeed, this 
and so many other evils for the Literary Man, and for all 
men, had, as from their fountain, taken rise. That our 
Hero as Man of Letters had to travel without highway, 
companionless, through an inorganic chaos, — and to leave 
his own life and faculty lying there, as a partial contribution 
towards pushing some highway through it : this, had not his 
faculty itself been so perverted and paralyzed, he might have 
put up with, might have considered to be but the common 
lot of Heroes. His fatal misery was the spiritual paralysis^ 
so we may name it, of the Age in which his life lay ; whereby 
his life too, do what he might, was half paralyzed ! The 
Eighteenth was a Sceptical Century ; in which little word 
there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries. Scepticism 
means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all 
sorts of ///fidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, 
in few centuries that one could specify since the world 
began, was a life of Heroism more difficult for a man. 
That was not an age of Faith, — an age of Heroes ! The 
very possibility of Heroism had been, as it were, formally 
abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; 
Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. 
The "age of miracles " had been, or perhaps had not been; 
but it was not any longer. An effete world ; wherein Won- 



1 90 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

der, Greatness, Godhood, could not now dwell; — in one 
word, a godless world ! 

How mean, dwarfish, are their ways of thinking, in this 
time, — compared not with the Christian Shakspeares and 
Miltons, but with the old Pagan Skalds, with any species 
of believing men! The living Tree Igdrasil, with the 
melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs, deep- 
rooted as Hela, has died out into the clanking of a World- 
Machine. "Tree" and "Machine:" contrast these two 
things. I, for my share, declare the world to be no machine! 
I say that it does 7tot go by wheel-and-pinion "motives," 
self-interests, checks, balances ; that there is something far 
other in it than the clank of spinning-jennies, and parlia- 
mentary majorities ; and, on the whole, that it is not a 
machine at all! — The old Norse Heathen had a truer 
notion of God's world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: 
the old Heathen Norse were sincere men. But for these 
poor Sceptics there was no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth 
and hearsay was called truth. Truth, for most men, meant 
plausibility ; to be measured by the number of votes you 
could get. They had lost any notion that sincerity was 
possible, or of what sincerity was. How many Plausibilities 
asking, with unaffected surprise and the air of offended 
virtue. What ! am not I sincere ? Spiritual Paralysis, I say, 
nothing left but a Mechanical life, was the characteristic of 
that century. For the common man, unless happily he stood 
oeiow his century and belonged to another prior one, it was 
impossible to be a Believer, a Hero ; he lay buried, uncon- 
scious, under these baleful influences. To the strongest 
man, only with infinite struggle and confusion was it possi- 
ble to work himself half loose ; apd lead as it were, in an 
enchanted, most tragical way, a spiritual death-in-life, and 
be a Half-Hero I 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. IQI 

Scepticism is the name we give to all this ; as the chief 
symptom, as the chief origin of all this. Concerning which 
so much were to be said ! It would take many Discourses, 
not a small fraction of one Discourse, to state what one feels 
about that Eighteenth Century and its ways. As indeed 
this, and the like of this, which we now call Scepticism, is 
precisely the black malady and life-foe, against which all 
teaching and discoursing since man's hfe began has directed 
itself: the battle of Belief against Unbelief is the never- 
ending battle ! Neither is it in the way of crimination that 
one would wish to speak. Scepticism, for that century, we 
must consider as the decay of old ways of believing, the 
preparation afar off for new better and wider ways, — an 
inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it; we will 
lament their hard fate. We will understand that destruc- 
tion of q\6. forms is not destruction of everlasting substances ; 
that Scepticism, as sorrowful and hateful as we see it, is not 
an end but a beginning. 

The other day speaking, without prior purpose that way, 
of Bentham's theory of man and man's life, I chanced to 
call it a more beggarly one than Mahomet's. I am bound 
to say, now when it is once uttered, that such is my deliber- 
ate opinion. Not that one would mean offence against the 
man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe 
him. Bentham himself, ^nd even the creed of Bentham, 
seems to me comparatively worthy of praise. It is a deter- 
minate being what all the world, in a cowardly half-and-half 
manner, was tending to be. Let us have the crisis; we 
shall either have death or the cure. I call this gross, 
steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith. 
It was a laying-down of cant; a saying to one's self: "Well 
then, this world is a dead iron machine, the god of it Gravi- 
tation and selfish Hunger ; let us see what, by checking and 



192 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

balancing, and good adjustment of tooth and pinion, can be 
made of it! " Benthamism has something complete, manful, 
in such fearless committal of itself to what it finds true ; you 
may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its eyes put out ! 
It is the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, of what 
lay in the half-and-half state, pervading man's whole exist- 
ence in that Eighteenth Century. It seems to me, all 
deniers of Godhood, and all lip-believers of it, are bound 
to be Benthamites, if they have courage and honesty. Ben- 
thamism is an eyeless Heroism : the Human Species, like a 
hapless Winded Samson grinding in the Phihstine Mill, 
clasps convulsively the pillars of its Mill; brings huge ruin 
down, but ultimately deliverance withal. Of Bentham I 
meant to say no harm. 

But this I do say, and would wish all men to know and 
lay to heart, that he who discerns nothing but Mechanism 
in the Universe has in the fatalest way missed the secret of 
the Universe altogether. That all Godhood should vanish 
out of men's conception of this Universe seems to me pre- 
cisely the most brutal error, — I will not disparage Heathen- 
ism by calling it a Heathen error, — that men could fall into. 
It is not true ; it is false at the very heart of it. A man who 
thinks so will think wrong about all things in the world; 
this original sin will vitiate all other conclusions he can 
form. One might call it the most lamentable of Delusions, 
— not forgetting Witchcraft itself! Witchcraft worshipped 
at least a living Devil ; but this worships a dead iron Devil; 
no God, not even a Devil ! — Whatsoever is noble, divine^ 
inspired, drops thereby out of life. There remains every- 
where in life a despicable caput-mortuumj the mechanical 
hull, all soul fled out of it. How can a man act heroically ? 
The " Doctrine of Motives " will teach him that it is, under 
more or less disguise, nothing but a wretched love of Ple^s- 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 1 93 

lire, /5ear of Pain ; that Hunger, of applause, of cash, of 
whatsoever victual it may be, is the ultimate fact of man's 
life. Atheism, in brief; — which does indeed frightfully 
punish itself. The man, I say, is become spiritually a 
paralytic man ; this godlike Universe a dead mechanical 
steam-engine, all working by motives, checks, balances, and 
I know not what; wherein, as in the detestable belly of 
some Phalaris'-Bull of his own contriving, he the poor 
Phalaris sits miserably dying ! 

Belief 1 define to be the healthy act of a man's mind. It 
is a mysterious indescribable process, that of getting to be- 
lieve ; — indescribable, as all vital acts are. We have our 
mind given us, not that it may cavil and argue, but that it 
may see into something, give us clear belief and understand- 
ing about something, whereon we are then to proceed to act. 
Doubt, truly, is not itself a crime. Certainly we do not rush 
out, clutch up the first thing we find, and straightway believe 
that ! All manner of doubt, inquiry, aKk\\!i.^ as it is named, 
about all manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable mind. 
It is the mystic working of the mind, on the object it is get- 
ting to know and believe. Belief comes out of all this, above 
ground, like the tree from its hidden roots. But now if, even 
on common things, we require that a man keep his doubts 
szlenf, and not babble of them till they in some measure 
become affirmations or denials ; how much more in regard 
to the highest things, impossible to speak of in words at all ! 
That a man parade his doubt, and get to imagine that debat- 
ing and logic (which means at best only the manner of telling 
us your thought, your belief or disbelief, about a thing) is the 
triumph and true work of what intellect he has : alas, this is as 
if you should overturn the tree, and instead of green boughs, 
leaves and fruits, show us ugly taloned roots turned up into 
the air, — and no growth, only death and misery going on \ 



194 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only ; it 
is moral also ; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole 
soul. A man lives by believing something: not by debating 
and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when 
all that he can manage to believe is something he can button 
in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest ! 
Lower than that he will not get. We call those ages in which 
he gets so low the mournfulest, sickest and meanest of all 
ages. The world's heart is palsied, sick : how can any limb 
of it be whole? Genuine Acting ceases in all departments 
of the world's work ; dextrous Similitude of Actina; beo:ins. 
The world's wages are pocketed, the world's work is not 
done. Heroes have gone out; Quacks have come in. Ac- 
cordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world, 
which also was a time of scepticism, simulacra and universal 
decadence, so abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth ? 
Consider them, with their tumid sentimental vaporing about 
virtue, benevolence, — the wretched Quack-squadron, Cagli- 
ostro at the head of them ! Few men were without quack- 
ery ; they had got to consider it a necessary ingredient and 
amalgam for truth. Chatham, our brave Chatham himself, 
comes down to the House, all wrapt and bandaged;, he "has 
crawled out in great bodily suffering," and so on ; — forgets., 
says Walpole, that he is acting the sick man ; in the fire of 
debate, snatches his arm from the sling, and oratorically 
swings and brandishes it ! Chatham himself lives the stran- 
gest mimetic life, half-hero, half-qnack, all along. For indeed 
the world is full of dupes ; and you have to gain the world's 
suffrage ! How the duties of the world will be done in that 
case, what quantities of error, which means failure, which 
means sorrow and misery, to some and to many, will gradu- 
ally accumulate in all provinces o£ the world's business, we 
need wot compute. 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. IQ^ 

It seems to me, you lay your finger here on the heart of 
the world's maladies, when you call it a Sceptical World. 
An insincere world ; a godless untruth of a world ! It is out 
of this, as I consider, that the whole tribe of social pesti- 
lences, French Revolutions, Chartisms, and what not, have 
derived their being, — their chief necessity to be. This must 
alter. Till this alter, nothing can beneficially alten My one 
hope of the world, my inexpugnable consolation in looking 
at the miseries of the world, is that this is altering. Here 
and there one does now find a man who knows, as of old, 
that this world is a Truth, and no Plausibility and Falsity; 
that he himself is alive, not dead or paralytic ; and that the 
world is alive, instinct with Godhood, beautiful and awful, 
even as in the beginning of days ! One man once knowing 
this, many men, all men, must by and by come to know it. 
It lies there clear, for whosoever will take the spectacles off 
his eyes and honestly look, to know! For such a man the 
Unbelieving Century, with its unblessed Products, is already 
past : a new century is already come. The old unblessed 
Products and Performances, as solid as they look, are Phan- 
tasms, preparing speedily to vanish. To this and the other 
noisy, very great-looking Simulacrum with the whole world 
huzzahing at its heels, he can say, composedly stepping 
aside : Thou art not true j thou art not extant, only sem- 
blant; go thy way! — Yes, hollow Formulism, gross Ben- 
thamism, and other unheroic atheistic Insincerity is visibly 
and even rapidly declining. An unbelieving Eighteenth Cen- 
tury is but an exception, — such as now and then occurs. I 
prophesy that the world will once more become sincere ; a 
believing world ; with many Heroes in it, a heroic world ! 
It will then be a victorious world; never till then. 

Or indeed what of the world and its victories ? Men 
speak too much about the world. Each one of us here, let 



1 96 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

the v/orld go how it will, and be victorious or not victorious; 
has he not a Life of his own to lead ? One Life ; a little 
gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance 
to us forevermore ! It were well for us to live not as fools 
and simulacra, but as wise and realities. The world's being 
saved will not save us ; nor the world's being lost destroy 
us. We should look to ourselves : there is great merit here 
in the " duty of staying at home " ! And, on the whole, to 
say truth, I never heard of '' worlds " being " saved " in any 
other way. That mania of saving worlds is itself a piece of 
the Eighteenth Century with its windy sentimentalism. Let 
us not follow it too far. For the saving of the world I will 
trust confidently to the Maker of the world ; and look a little 
to my own saving, which I am more competent to! — In 
brief, for the world's sake, and for our own, we will rejoice 
greatly that Scepticism, Insincerity, Mechanical Atheism, 
with all their poison-dews, are going, and as good as 
gone. 

Now it was under such conditions, in those times of 
Johnson, that our Men of Letters had to live. Times in 
which there was properly no truth in life. Old truths had 
fallen nigh dumb ; the new lay yet hidden, not trying to 
speak. That Man's Life here below was a Sincerity and 
Fact, and would forever continue such, no new intimation, 
in that dusk of the world, had yet dawned. No intimation ; 
not even any French Revolution, — which we define to be 
a Truth once more, though a Truth clad in hellfire ! How 
different was the Luther's pilgrimage, with its assured goal, 
from the Johnson's, girt with mere traditions, suppositions, 
grown now incredible, unintelligible ! Mahomet's Formulas 
were of " wood waxed and oiled," and could be burnt out of 
one's way: poor Johnson's were far more difficult to burn. — ■ 
The strong man will ever find work^ which means difficulty^, 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 1 97 

pain, to the full measure of his strength. But to make out 
a victory, in those circumstances of our poor Hero as Man 
of Letters, was perhaps more difficult than in any. Not 
obstruction, disorganization, Bookseller Osborne and Four- 
pence-halfpenny a day ; not this alone ; but the light of his 
own soul was taken from him. No landmark on the Earth ; 
and, alas, what is that to having no loadstar in the Heaven ! 
We need not wonder that none of those Three men rose to 
victory. That they fought truly is the highest praise. With 
a mournful sympathy we will contemplate, if not three living 
victorious Heroes, as I said, the Tombs of three fallen 
Heroes! They fell for us too; making a way for us. There 
are the mountains which they hurled abroad in their con- 
fused War of the Giants ; under which, their strength and 
life spent, they now lie buried. 

I have already written of these three Literary Heroes, 
expressly or incidentally ; what I suppose is known to most 
of you; what need not be spoken or written a second time. 
They concern us here as the singular Prophets of that sin- 
gular age ; for such they virtually were ; and the aspect 
they and their world exhibit, under this point of view, might 
lead us into reflections enough ! I call them, all three, 
Genuine Men more or less ; faithfully, for most part uncon- 
sciously, struggling to be genuine, and plant themselves 
on the everlasting truth of things. This to a degree that 
eminently distinguishes them from the poor artificial mass 
of their contemporaries ; and renders them worthy to be 
considered as Speakers, in some measure, of the everlasting 
truth, as Prophets in that age of theirs. By Nature herself 
a noble necessity was laid on them to be so. They were 
men of such magnitude that they could not live on unreali- 
ties, — clouds, froth and all inanity gave way under them; 



198 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

there was no footing for them but on firm earth ; no rest or 
regular motion for them, if they got not footing there. To 
a certain extent, they were Sons of Nature once more in an 
age of Artifice ; once more. Original Men. 

As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by 
nature, one of our great English souls. A strong and noble 
man ; so much left undeveloped in him to the last : in a kind- 
lier element what might he not have been, — Poet, Priest, 
sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a man must not complain 
of his "element," of his "time," or the like; it is thriftless 
work doing so. His time is bad : well then, he is there to 
make it better! — Johnson's youth was poor, isolated, hope- 
less, very miserable. Indeed, it does not seem possible that, 
in any the favorablest outward circumstances, Johnson's life 
could have been other than a painful one. The world might 
have had more of profitable work out of him, or less ; but 
his <?^r/ against the world's work coald never have been a 
light one. Nature, in return for his nobleness, had said to 
him. Live in an element of diseased sorrow. Nay, perhaps 
the sorrow and the nobleness were intimately and even in- 
separably connected with each other. At all events, poor 
Johnson. had to go about girt with continual hypochondria, 
physical and spiritual pain. Like a Hercules with the burn- 
ing Nessus'-shirt on him, which shoots in on him dull incur- 
able misery: the Nessus'-shirt not to be stript off, which is 
his own natural skin ! In this manner he had to live. Fig- 
ure him there, with his scrofulous diseases, with his great 
greedy heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts ; stalking 
mournful as a stranger in this Earth ; eagerly devouring 
what spiritual thing he could come at : school-languages and 
other merely grammatical stuff, if there were nothing better ! 
The largest soul that was in all England ; and provision 
made for it of " fourpence-halfpenny a day." Yet a giant 




I'lTCHES THEM OUT OF WINDOW.'' — Page I99. 



I 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 1 99 

invincible soul ; a true man's. One remembers always that 
story of the shoes at Oxford : the rough, seamy faced, raw- 
boned College Servitor stalking about, in winter-season, with 
his shoes worn out ; how the charitable Gentleman Com- 
moner secretly places a new pair at his door; and the raw- 
boned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with his 
dim eyes, with what thoughts, — pitches them out of window! 
Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger, or what you will ; but not beg- 
gary : we cannot stand beggary ! Rude stubborn self-help 
here : a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery 
and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness withal. It is a 
type of the man's life, this pitching away of the shoes. An 
original man; — not a second-hand, borrowing or begging 
man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate ! On such 
shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you 
will, but honestly on that; — on the reality and substance 
which Nature gives us, not on the semblance, on the thing 
she has g-iven another than us ! 

And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self- 
help, was there ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally 
submissive to what was really higher than he.'' Great souls 
are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them ; 
only small mean souls are otherwise. I could not find a 
better proof of what I said the other day, That the sincere 
man was by nature the obedient man ; that only in a World 
of Heroes was there loyal Obedience to the Heroic. The 
essence of origmality is not that it be new : Johnson believed 
altogether in the old; he found the old opinions credible for 
him, fit for him ; and in a right heroic manner lived* under 
them. He is well worth study in regard to that. For we 
are to say that Johnson was far other than a mere man of 
words and formulas ; he was a man of truths and facts. He 
stood by the old formulas ; the happier was it for him that 



200 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

he could so stand : but in all formulas that he could stand 
by, there needed to be a most genuine substance. Very 
curious how, in that poor Paper-age, so barren, artificial, 
thick-quilted with Pedantries, Hearsays, the great Fact of 
this Universe glared in, forever wonderful, indubitable, un- 
speakable, divine-infernal, upon this man too ! How he har- 
monized his Formulas with it, how he managed at all under 
such circumstances : that is a thing worth seeing. A thing 
" to be looked at with reverence, with pity, with awe." That 
Church of St. Clement Danes, where Johnson still worsJiipped 
in the era of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place. 

It was in virtue of his sincei'ity^ of his speaking still in 
some sort from the heart of Nature, though in the current 
artificial dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet. Are not all 
dialects " artificial " ? Artificial things are not all false ; — 
nay every true Product of Nature will infallibly shape itself; 
we may say all artificial things are, at the starting of theni, 
true. What we call " Formulas " are not in their origin bad ; . 
they are indispensably good. Formula is method., habitude ; 
found wherever man is found. Formulas fashion themselves 
as Paths do, as beaten Highways, leading towards some sa- 
cred or high object, whither many men are bent. Consider 
it. One man, full of heartfelt earnest impulse, finds out a 
way of doing somewhat, — were it of uttering his soul's rev- 
erence for the Highest, were it but of fitly saluting his fellow- 
man. An inventor was needed to do that, a poet ; he has 
articulated the dim-struggling thought that dwelt in his own 
and many hearts. This is his way of doing that; these are 
his footsteps, the beginning of a " Path." And now see ; 
the second man travels naturally in the footsteps of his fore- 
goer, it is the easiest method. In the footsteps of his fore- 
goer ; yet with improvements, with changes where such seem 
good; at all events with enlargements, the Path ever widen- 



THE liEkO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 20 1 

ing itself as more travel it; — till at last there is a broad 
Highway whereon the whole world may travel and drive. 
While there remains a City or Shrine, or any Reality to drive 
to, at the farther end, the Highway shall be right welcome ! 
When the City is gone, we will forsake the Highway. In 
this manner all Institutions, Practices, Regulated Things in 
the world have come into existence, and gone out of exist- 
ence. Formulas all begin by being/)/// of substance; you 
may call them the skin^ the articulation into shape, into 
limbs and skin, of a substance that is already there : they 
had not been there otherwise. Idols, as we said, are not 
idolatrous till they become doubtful, empty for the worship- 
per's heart. Much as we talk against Formulas, I hope no 
one of us is ignorant withal of the high significance of tr2ie 
Formulas ; that they were, and will ever be, the indispensa- 

blest furniture of our habitation in this world. 

Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his " sincerity." 
He has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere, — 
of his being particularly any thing ! A hard-struggling, 
weary-hearted man, or " scholar " as he calls himself, trying 
hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to 
starve, but to live — without stealing! A noble uncon 
sciousness is in him. He does not "engrave Truth on his 
watch-seal; " no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works 
and lives by it. Thus it ever is. Think of it once more. 
The man whom Nature has appointed to do great things 
is, first of all, furnished with that openness to Nature which 
renders him incapable of being /;/sincere ! To his large, 
open, deep-feeling heart Nature is a Fact : all hearsay is 
hearsay ; the unspeakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, 
let him acknowledge it or not, nay even though he seem to 
forget it or deny it, is ever present to him, — fearful and 
wonderful, on this hand and on that. He has a basis of 



f 



202 LECTURES ON HEROES, 

sincerity; unrecognized, because never questioned or capa- 
ble of question. Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon: 
all the Great Men I ever heard of have this as the primary 
material of them. Innumerable commonplace men are de- 
bating, are talking everywhere their commonplace doctrines, 
which they have learned by logic, by rote, at second-hand ; 
to that kind of man all this is still nothing. He must have 
truth; truth which lie feels to be true. How shall he stand 
otherwise? His whole soul, at all moments, in all ways, 
tells him that there is no standing. He is under the noble 
necessity of being true. Johnson's way of thinking about 
this world is not mine, any more than Mahomet's was : but 
I recognize the everlasting element of \\^2,x\.-sincerity in 
both ; and see with pleasure how neither of them remains 
ineffectual. Neither of them is as chaff sown ; in both of 
them is something which the seed-field will grow. 

Johnson was a Prophet to his people ; preached a Gospel 
to them, — as all like him always do. The highest Gospel he 
preached we may describe as a kind of Moral Prudence : 
"in a world where much is to be done, and little is to be 
known," see how )0u will do\\.\ A thing well worth preach- 
ing. " A world where much is to be done, and little is to 
be known : " do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless 
abysses of Doubt, of wretched God-forgetting Unbelief; — 
you were miserable then, powerless, mad : how could you 
do or work at all ? Such Gospel Johnson preached and 
taught; — coupled, theoretically and practically, with this 
other great Gospel, " Clear your mind of Cant ! " Have 
no trade with Cant : stand on the cold mud in the frosty 
weather, but let it be in your own real torn shoes : " that 
will be better for you," as Mahomet says ! I call this, I call 
these two thmgs joined togef her, a great Gospel, the greatest 
perhaps that was possible at that time. 



THE HEkO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 203 

Johnson's Writings, which once had such currency and 
celebrity, are now, as it were, disowned by the young gen- 
eration. It is not wonderful; Johnson's opinions are fast 
becoming obsolete : but his style of thinking and of living, 
we may hope, will never become obsolete. I find in John- 
son's Books the indisputablest traces of a great intellect 
and great heart; — ever welcome, under what obstructions 
and perversions soever. They are sincere words, those of 
his ; he means things by them. A wondrous buckram style, 
— the best he could get to then; a measured grandiloquence, 
stepping or rather stalking along in a very solemn way, 
grown obsolete now; sometimes a tumid size of phraseology 
not in proportion to the contents of it: all this you will put 
up with. For the phraseology, tumid or not, has always 
something within it. So many beautiful styles and books, 
with nothing in them ; — a man is a ;;2«Mactor to the world 
who writes such ! They are the avoidable kind ! — Had 
Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary., one might have 
traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to its 
clearness of definition, its general solidity, honesty, insight 
and successful method, it may be called the best of all 
Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural noble- 
ness ; it stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, 
finished, symmetrically complete : you judge that a true 
Builder did it. 

One word, in spite of our haste, must be granted to poor 
Bozzy. He passes for a mean, inflated, gluttonous creature; 
and was so in many senses. Yet the fact of his rever- 
ence for Johnson will ever remain noteworthy. The foolish 
conceited Scotch Laird, the most conceited man of his 
time, approaching in such awestruck attitude the great dusty 
irascible Pedagogue in his mean garret there : it is a 
genuine reverence for Excellence ; a worship for Heroes, at 



204 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

2l time when neither Heroes nor worship were surmised 
to exist. Heroes, it would seem, exist always, and a cer- 
tain worship of them ! We will also take the liberty to 
deny altogether that of the witty Frenchman, that no man 
is a Hero to his valet-de-chambre. Or if so, it is not the 
Hero's blame, but the Valet's : that his soul, namely, is a 
mean valet-'&ovX ! He expects his Hero to advance in 
royal stage-trappings, with measured step, trains borne 
behind him., trumpets sounding before him. It should stand 
rather, No man can be a Gra?td Monargue to his valet-de- 
chambre. Strip your Louis Ouatorze of his king gear, and 
there is left nothing but a poor forked raddish with a head 
fantastically carved ; — admirable to no valet. The Valet 
does not know a Hero when he sees him ! Alas, no : it 
requires a kind of Hero to do that ; — and one of the world's 
wants, in this as in other senses, is for most part want of 
such. 

On the whole, shall we not say, that Boswell's admiration 
was well bestowed; that he could have found no soul in all 
England so worthy of bending down before? Shall we not 
say, of this great mournful Johnson too, that he guided his 
difficult confused existence wisely ; led it well, like a right- 
valiant man ? That waste chaos of Authorship by trade ; 
that waste chaos of Scepticism in rehgion and politics, in 
, life-theory and life-practice ; in his poverty, in his dust and 
dimness, with the sick body and the rusty coat : he made 
it do for him, like a brave man. Not wholly without a load- 
star in the Eternal ; he had still a loadstar, as the brave all 
need to have : with his eye set on that, he would change his 
course for nothing in these confused vortices of the lower 
sea of Time. " To the Spirit of Lies, bearing death and 
hunger, he would in no wise strike his flag." Brave old 
Samuel : ultimus Romanorum ! 







"a high but narrow contracted intensity in it." — Page 205. 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 205 

Of Rousseau and his Heroism I cannot say so much. He 
is not what I call a strong man. A morbid, excitable, spas- 
modic man ; at best, intense rather than strong. He had 
not " the talent of Silence," an invaluable talent ; which few 
Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort in these times, excel 
in! The suffering man ought really "to consume his own 
smoke;" there is no good in emitting S7noke till you have 
made it into fire^ — which, in the metaphorical sense too, 
all smoke is capable of becoming ! Rousseau has not depth 
or width, not calm force for difficulty; the first characteristic 
of true greatness. A fundamental mistake to call vehemence 
and rigidity strength ! A man is not strong who takes con- 
vulsion-fits ; though six men cannot hold him then. He 
that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, 
he is the strong man. We need forever, especially in these 
loud-shrieking days, to remind ourselves of that. A man 
who cannot hold his peace^ till the time come for speaking 
and acting, is no right man. 

Poor Rousseau's face is to me expressive of him. A high 
but narrow contracted intensity in it : bony brows ; deep, 
straight-set eyes, in which there is something bewildered- 
looking, — bewildered, peering with lynx-eagerness. A face 
full of misery, even ignoble misery, and also of the antago- 
nism against that ; something mean, plebeian there, redeemed 
only by intensity : the face of what is called a Fanatic, — a 
sadly contracted Hero ! We name him here because, with 
all his drawbacks, and they are many, he has the first and 
chief characteristic of a Hero : he is heartily in earnest. In 
earnest, if ever man was ; as none of these French Philo- 
sophes were. Nay, one would say, of an earnestness too great 
for his otherwise sensitive, rather feeble nature : and which 
indeed in the end drove him into the strangest incoherences, 
almost delirations. There had come, at last, to be a kind of 



206 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

madness in him: his Ideas ^^j-i'^j-j-^^^ him like demons; hur- 
ried him so about, drove him over steep places ! — 

The fault and misery of Rousseau was what we easily 
name by a single word, Egoism ; which is indeed the source 
and summary of all faults and miseries whatsoever. He had 
not perfected himself into victory over mere Desire; a mean 
Hunger, in many sorts, was still the motive principle of him. 
I am afraid he was a very vain man ; hungry for the praises 
of men. You remember Genhs's experience of him. She 
took Jean Jacques to the Theatre; he bargaining for a strict 
incognito, — '■'•He would not be seen there for the world!" 
The curtain did happen nevertheless to be drawn aside : the 
Pit recognized Jean Jacques, but took no great notice of him ! 
He expressed the bitterest indignation; gloomed all evening, 
spake no other than surly words. The glib Countess re- 
mained entirely convinced that his anger was not at being 
seen, but at not being applauded when seen. How the whole 
nature of the man is poisoned; nothing but suspicion, self- 
isolation, fierce moody ways ! He could not hve with any- 
body. A man of some rank from the country, who visited 
him often, and used to sit with him, expressing all reverence 
and affection for him, comes one day, finds Jean Jacques full 
of the sourest unintelligible humor. " Monsieur," said Jean 
Jacques, with flaming eyes, " I know why you come here. 
You come to see what a poor hfe I lead; how little is in my 
poor pot that is boiling there. Well, look into the pot ! 
There is half a pound of meat, one carrot and three onions; 
that is all : go and tell the whole world that, if you like, 
Monsieur ! " — A man of this sort was far gone. The whole 
world got itself supplied with anecdotes, for light laughter, 
for a certain theatrical interest, from these perversions and 
contortions of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, to him they were 
not laughing or theatrical ; too real to him ! The contor^ 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 20/ 

tions of a dying gladiator : the crowded amphitheatre looks 
on with entertainment; but the gladiator is in agonies and 
dying. 

And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate 
appeals to Mothers, with his Contrat-social^ with his celebra- 
tions of Nature, even of savage life in Nature, did once more 
touch upon Reahty, struggle towards Reality: was doing the 
function of a Prophet to his Time. As he could, and as the 
Time could ! Strangely through all that defacement, degra- 
dation and almost madness, there is in the inmost heart of 
poor Rousseau a spark of real heavenly fire. Once more 
out of the element of that withered mocking Philosophism, 
Scepticism and Persiflage, there has arisen in this man the 
ineradicable feeling and knowledge that this Life of ours is 
true ; not a Scepticism, Theorem, or Persiflage, but a Fact, 
an awful Reality. Nature had made that rev^elation to him ; 
had ordered him to speak it out. He got it spoken out : if 
not well and clearly, then ill and dimly, — as clearly as he 
could. Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, even 
those stealings of ribbons, aimless confused miseries and 
vagabondisms, if we will interpret them kindly, but the blink- 
ard dazzlement and staggerings to and fro of a man sent on 
an errand he is too weak for, by a path he cannot yet find ? 
Men are led by strange ways. One should have tolerance 
for a man, hope of him; leave him to try yet what he will 
do. While life lasts, hope lasts for every man. 

Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly celebrated still 
among his countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like 
himself, are what I call unhealthy: not the good sort of 
Books. There is a sensuality in Rousseau. Combined with 
such an intellectual gift as his, it makes pictures of a certain 
gorgeous attractiveness : but they are not genuinely poetical. 
Not white sunhght: something ^/^r^//^y a kind of rosepink, 



208 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

artificial bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it is univer- 
sal, among the French since his time. Madame de Stael 
has something of it ; St, Pierre ; and down onwards to the 
present astonishing convulsionary " Literature of Despera- 
tion," it is everywhere abundant. That same rosepink is 
not the right hue. Look at a Shakspeare, at a Goethe, even 
at a Walter Scott ! He who has once seen into this, has 
seen the difference of the True from the Sham-True, and 
will discriminate them ever afterwards. 

We had to observe in Johnson how much good a Prophet, 
under all disadvantages and disorganizations, can accomplish 
for the world. In Rousseau we are called to look rather at 
the fearful amount of evil which, under such disorganization, 
may accompany the good. Historically it is a most pregnant 
spectacle, that of Rousseau. Banished into Paris garrets, in 
the gloomy company of his own Thoughts and Necessities 
there; driven from post to pillar; fretted, exasperated till 
the heart of him went mad, he had grown to feel deeply 
that the world was not his friend nor the world's law. It 
was expedient, if any way possible, that such a man should 
7iot have been set in flat hostility with the world. He could 
be cooped into garrets, laughed at as a maniac, left to starve 
like a wild-beast in his cage; — but he could not be hindered 
from setting the world on fire. The French Revolution 
found its Evangelist in Rousseau. His semi-delirious spec- 
ulations on the miseries of civilized life, the preferability of 
the savage to the civilized, and such like, helped well to 
produce a whole dehrium in France generally. True, you 
may well ask, What could the world, the governors of the 
world, do with such a man ? Difficult to say what the gov- 
ernors of the world could do with him ! What he could do 
with them is unhappily clear enough, — giiiliotine 9. great 
niany of them ! Enough now of Rousseau. 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 209 

It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbeliev- 
ing, second-hand Eighteenth Century, that of a Hero starting 
up, among the artificial pasteboard figures and productions, 
in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a little well in the 
rocky desert places, — hke a sudden splendor of Heaven 
in the artificial Vauxhall ! People knew not what to make 
of it. They took it for a piece of the Vauxhall firework ; 
alas, it let itself be so taken, though struggling half-blindly, 
as in bitterness of death, against that ! Perhaps no man 
had such a false reception from his fellow-men. Once more 
a very wasteful life-drama was enacted under the sun. 

The tragedy of Burns's hfe is known to all of you. Surely 
we may say, if discrepancy between place held and place 
merited constitute perverseness of lot for a man, no lot could 
be more perverse than Burns's. Among those second-hand 
acting-figures, mwtes for most part, of the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury, once more a giant Original Man; one of those men 
who reach down to the perennial Deeps, who take rank with 
the Heroic among men : and he was born in a poor Ayrshire 
hut. The largest soul of all the British lands came among 
us in the shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant. 

His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things ; did 
not succeed in any; was involved in continual difficulties. 
The Steward, Factor as the Scotch call him, used to send 
letters and threatenings, Burns says, "which threw us all 
into tears." The brave, hard-toiling, hard-suffering Father, 
his brave heroine of a wife; and those children, of whom 
Robert was one ! In this Earth, so wide otherwise, no 
shelter for them. The letters " threw us all into tears : "^ 
figure it. The brave Father, I say always; — a silent Hero 
and Poet ; without whom the son had never been a speaking 
one ! Burns's Schoolmaster came afterwards to London, 
learnt what good society was ; but declares that in no 



210 LECTURES ON HEROES, 

meeting of men did he ever enjoy better discourse than at 
the hearth of this peasant. And his poor " seven acres of 
nursery-ground," — not that, nor the miserable patch of clay- 
farm, nor any thing he tried to get a living by, would prosper 
with him ; he had a sore unequal battle all his days. But 
he stood to it valiantly ; a wise, faithful, unconquerable man; 
— swallowing down how many sore sufferings daily into 
silence ; fighting like an unseen Hero, — nobody pubhshing 
newspaper paragraphs about his nobleness; voting pieces 
of plate to him ! However, he was not lost : nothing is lost. 
Robert is there ; the outcome of him, — and indeed of many 
generations of such as him. 

This Burns appeared under every disadvantage : unin- 
structed, poor, born only to hard manual toil ; and writing, 
when it came to that, in a rustic special dialect, known only 
to a small province of the country he lived in. Had he 
written, even what he did write, in the general language of 
England, I doubt not he had already become universally 
recognized as being, or capable to be, one of our greatest 
men. That he should have tempted so many to penetrate 
through the rough husk of that dialect of his, is proof that 
there lay something far from common within it. He has 
gained a certain recognition, and is continuing to do so 
over all quarters of our wide Saxon world : wheresoever a 
Saxon dialect is spoken, it begins to be understood, by 
personal inspection of this and the other, that one of the 
most considerable Saxon men of the Eighteenth century 
was an Ayrshire Peasant named Robert Burns. Yes, I will 
say, here too was a piece of the right Saxon stuff : strong 
as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world ; — rock, 
yet with wells of living softness in it ! A wild impetuous 
whirlwind of passion and faculty slumbered quiet there ; 
such heavenly 7nelody dwelling in the heart of it. A noble 




"an AVFSHIRtr PRASAN'T, NAMED Por.ERT BURNS,"— /'.■rf^^ 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 211 

rough genuineness ; homely, rustic, honest ; true simplicity 
of strength; with its lightning-fire, with its soft dewy pity; 
— like the old Norse Thor, the Peasant-god ! 

Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, 
has told me that Robert, in his young days, in spite of their 
hardship, was usually the gayest of speech ; a fellow of 
infinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart ; far pleasanter to 
hear there, stript cutting peats in the bog, or suchhke, than 
he ever afterwards knew him. I can well believe it. This 
basis of mirth i^'- fond gaillard^^' as old Marquis Mirabeau 
calls it), a primal element of sunshine and joyfulness, coupled 
with his other deep and earnest qualities, is one of the most 
attractive characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope 
dwells in him ; spite of his tragical history, he is not a 
mourning man. He shakes his sorrows gallantly aside ; 
bounds forth victorious over them. It is as the lion shak- 
ing "dewdrops from his mane;" as the swift-bounding 
horse, that laughs at the shaking of the spear. — But indeed, 
Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns's, are they not the out- 
come properly of warm generous affection, — such as is the 
beginning of all to every man ? 

You would think it strange if I called Burns the most 
gifted British soul we had ni all that century of his : and 
yet I believe the day is coming when there will be little 
danger in saying so. His writings, all that he did under 
such obstructions, are only a poor fragment of him. Pro- 
fessor Stewart remarked very justly, what indeed is true of 
all Poets good for much, that his poetry was not any partic- 
ular faculty ; but the general result of a naturally vigorous 
original mind expressing itself in that way. Burns's gifts, 
expressed in conversation, are the theme of all that ever 
heard him. All kinds of orifts : from the gracefulest utter- 
ances of courtesy, to the highest fire of passionate speech ; 



212 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of affection, laconic 
emphasis, clear piercing insight ; all was in hirn. Wittj 
duchesses celebrate him as a man whose speech "led them 
off their feet." This is beautiful : but still more beautiful 
that which Mr. Lockhart has recorded, which I have more 
than once alluded to, How the waiters and hostlers at inns 
would get out of bed, and come crowding to hear this man 
speak! Waiters and hostlers: — they, too were men, and 
here was a man ! I have heard much about his speech ; 
but one of the best things I ever heard of it was, last year, 
from a venerable gentleman long familiar with him. That 
it was speech distinguished by always having so7}tetJiing in 
it. " He spoke rather little than much," this old man told 
me; "sat rather silent in those early days, as in the com- 
pany of persons above him ; and always when he did speak, 
it was to throw new light on the matter." I know not why 
any one should ever speak otherwise ! — But if we look at 
his general force of soul, his healthy robustness every way, 
the rugged downrightness, penetration, generous valor and 
manfulness that was in him, — where shall we readily find 
a better-gifted man ? 

Among the great men of the Eighteenth Century, I some- 
times feel as if Burns might be found to resemble Mirabeau 
more than any other. They differ widely in vesture ; yet 
look at them intrinsically. There is the same burly thick- 
necked strength of body as of soul ; — built, in both cases, 
on what the old Marquis calls a fond gaillard. By nature, 
by course of breeding, indeed by nation, Mirabeau has much 
more of bluster; a noisy, forward, unresting man. But the 
characteristic of Mirabeau too is veracity and sense, power 
of true insight^ superiority of vision. The thing that he says 
is worth remembering. It is a flash of insight into some 
object or other; so do both these men speak. The same 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 213 

raging passions; capable too in both of manifesting them- 
selves as the tenderest noble affections. Wit, wild laughter, 
energy, directness, sincerity : these were in both. The types 
of the two men are not dissimilar. Burns too could have 
governed, debated in National Assemblies ; politicized, as 
few could. Alas, the courage which had to exhibit itself 
in capture of smuggling schooners in the Solway Frith ; in 
keeping silence over so much, where no good speech, but 
only inarticulate rage, was possible : this might have bel- 
lowed forth Ushers de Breze and the like ; and made itself 
visible to all men, in managing of kingdoms, in ruling of 
great ever-memorable epochs ! But they said to him reprov- 
ingly, his Official Superiors said, and wrote : " You are to 
work, not think." Of your think ing-id.Q.Vii.'vj , the greatest in 
this land, we have no need; you are to gauge beer there; for 
that only are yon wanted. Very notable ; — and worth men- 
tioning, though we know what is to be said and answered ! 
As if Thought, Power of Thinking, were not, at all times, in 
all places and situations of the world, precisely the thing 
that was wanted. The fatal man, is he not always the 
z^;zthinking man, the man who cannot think and see j but 
only grope, and hallucinate, and ynisseo. the nature of the 
thing he works with ? He missees it, mxstakes it as we 
say ; takes it for one thing, and it is another thing, — and 
leaves him standing like a Futility there ! He is the fatal 
man ; unutterably fatal, put in the high places of men. — 
" Why complain of this ? " say some : " Strength is mourn- 
fully denied its arena ; that was true from of old." Doubt- 
less ; and the worse for the arena, answer I ! Co?nplaining 
profits little ; stating of the truth may profit. That a Europe, 
with its P'rench Revolution just breaking out, finds no need 
of a Burns except for gauging beer, — is a thing I, for one, 
cannot rejoice at ! 



214 LECTURES OJV HEROES. 

Once more we have to say here, that the chief quality of 
Burns is the sincerity of him. So in his Poetry, so in his 
Life. The Song he sings is not of fantasticalities ; it is of a 
thing felt, really there ; the prime merit of this, as of all in 
him, and of his Life generally, is truth. The Life of Burns 
is what we may call a great tragic sincerity. A sort of sav- 
age sincerity, — not cruel, far from that; but wild, wrestling 
naked with the truth of things. In that sense, there is 
something of the savage in all great men. 

Hero-worship, — Odin, Burns? Well; these Men of Let- 
ters too were not without a kind of Hero-worship : but what 
a strange condition has that got into now ! The waiters and 
hostlers of Scotch inns, prying about the door, eager to catch 
any word that fell from Burns, were doing unconscious 
reverence to the Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell for wor- 
shipper. Rousseau had worshippers enough ; princes calling 
on him in his mean garret; the great, the beautiful doing 
reverence to the poor moonstruck man. For himself a most 
portentous contradiction ; the two ends of his life not to be 
brought into harmony. He sits at the tables of grandees ; 
and has to copy music for his own living. He cannot even 
get his music copied. " By dint of dining out," says he, " I 
run the risk of dying by starvation at home." For his wor- 
shippers too a most questionable thing ! If doing Hero- 
worship well or badly be the test of vital well-being or ill- 
being to a generation, can we say that these generations are 
very first-rate ? — And yet our heroic Men of Letters do teach, 
govern, are kings, priests, or what you like to call them; 
intrinsically there is no preventing it by any means whatever. 
The world has to obey him who thinks and sees in the world. 
The world can alter the manner of that ; can either have it 
as blessed continuous summer sunshine, or as unblessed 
black thunder and tornado, — with unspeakable difference of 




/ --'■^<iii^>KJ2 



.^1^- 



" WAITF.RS AND HnSTI.RRS : TUK\ TOO WERE MEN, AND HERE 
WAS A MAN." — Pag-e 212. 



THE HERO AS MAN OE LETTERS. - 21 ^ 

profit for the world! The manner of it is very alterable; 
the matter and fact of it is not alterable by any power under 
the sky. Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world can 
take its choice. Not whether we call an Odin god, prophet, 
priest, or what we call him ; but whether we believe the 
word he tells us : there it all lies. If it be a true word, we 
shall have to believe it ; believing it, we shall have to do it. 
What na?ne or welcome Ave give him or it, is a point that 
concerns ourselves mainly. //, the new Truth, new deeper 
revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily of the 
nature of a message from on high ; and must and will have 
itself obeyed. 

My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burn's his- 
tory, — his visit to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if 
his demeanor there were the highest proof he gave of what 
a fund of worth and genuine manhood was in him. If we 
think of it, few heavier burdens could be laid on the strength 
of a man. So sudden ; all conwrvon Lionis?n, which ruins in- 
numerable men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon 
had been made a King of, not gradually, but at once from 
the Artillery Lieutenancy in the Regiment La Fere. Burns, 
still only in his twenty-seventh year, is no longer even a 
ploughman ; he is flying to the West Indies to escape dis- 
grace and a jail. This month he is a ruined peasant, his 
wages seven pounds a year, and these gone from him : next 
month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing down 
jewelled Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! 
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man ; but for one man 
who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand 
adversity. I admire much the way in which Burns met all 
this. Perhaps no man one could point out, was ever so 
sorely tried, and so little forgot himself. Tranquil, unaston- 
ished ; not abashed, not inflated, neither awkwardness nor 



2l6 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

affectation : he feels that he there is the man Robert Burns ; 
that the "rank is but the guinea-stamp;" that the celebrity- 
is but the candle-light, which will show what man, not in the 
least make him a better or other man ! Alas, it may readily, 
unless he look to it, make him a worse man; a wretched 
inflated wind-bag, — inflated till he <5/^;'i'/, and become a dead 
lion ; for whom, as some one has said, " there is no resurrec- 
tion of the body;" worse than a living dog! — Burns is 
admirable here. 

And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion- 
hunters were the ruin and death of Burns. It was they that 
rendered it impossible for him to live ! They gathered round 
him in his Farm; hindered his industry; no place was re- 
mote enough from them. He could not get his Lionism 
forgotten, honestly as he was disposed to do so. He falls 
into discontents, into miseries, faults ; the world getting ever 
more desolate for him; health, character, peace of mind all 
gone; — solitary enough now. It is tragical to think of! 
These men came but to see him ; it was out of no sympathy 
with him, nor no hatred to him. They came to get a little 
amusement: they got their amusement; — and the Hero's 
life went for it ! 

Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra there is a kind of 
" Light-chafers," large Fire-flies, which people stick upon 
spits, and illuminate the ways with at night. Persons of con- 
dition can thus travel with a pleasant radiance, which they 
much admire. Great honor to the Fire-flies ! But — ! — 



THE HERO AS KING. 21/ 



LECTURE VL 

THE HERO AS KING. CROMWELL, NAPOLEON: MODERN 
REVOLUTIONISM. 

[Friday, 22d May, /5^o.] 

We come now to the last form of Heroism; that which we 
call Kingship. The Commander over Men ; he to whose 
will our wills are to be subordinated, and loyally surrender 
themselves, and find their welfare in doing so, may be reck- 
oned the most important of Great Men. He is practically 
the summary for us of all the various figures of Heroism ; 
Priest, Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual dignity 
we can fancy to reside in a man, embodies itself here, to 
co?nmaiid over us, to furnish us with constant practical 
teaching, to tell us for the day and hour what we are to do. 
He is called Rex., Regulator, Roi : our own name is still bet- 
ter ; King, Konning., which means C^;/-ning, Able-man. 

Numerous considerations, pointing towards deep, question- 
able, and indeed unfathomable regions, present themselves 
here : on the most of which we must resolutely for the pres- 
ent forbear to speak at all. As Burke said that perhaps fair 
T7'ial by Jufy was the soul of Government, and that all 
legislation, administration, parliamentary debating, and the 
rest of it, went on, in "order to bring twelve impartial men 
into a jury-box ; " — so, by much stronger reason, may I say 
here, that the finding of your Ablefnan and getting him in- 



2l8 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

vested with the syjnbols of ability., with dignity, worship 
(w<9rM-ship), royalty, kinghood, or whatever we call it, so 
that he may actually have room to guide according to his 
faculty of doing it, — is the business, well or ill accomplished, 
of all social procedure whatsoever in this world ! Hustings- 
speeches, Parliamentary motions, Reform Bills, French Rev- 
olutions, all mean at heart this ; or else nothing. Find in 
any country the Ablest Man that exists there ; raise him to 
the supreme place, and loyally reverence him : you have a 
perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parlia- 
mentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other 
machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit. It is in the 
perfect state ; an ideal country. The Ablest Man ; he means 
also the truest-hearted, justest, the Noblest Man : what he 
tells us to do must be precisely the wisest, fittest, that we 
could anywhere or anyhow learn; — the thing which it will 
in all ways behove us, with right loyal thankfulness, and 
nothing doubting, to do ! Our doing and life were then, so 
far as government could regulate it, well regulated; that 
were the ideal of constitutions. 

Alas, we know very well that Ideals can never be com- 
pletely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a very 
great way off ; and we will right thankfully content ourselves 
with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no 
man, as Schiller says, too querulously " measure by a scale 
of perfection the meagre product of reality " in this poor 
world of ours. We will esteem him no wise man ; we will 
esteem him a sickly, discontented, foolish man. And yet, on 
the other hand, it is never to be forgotten that Ideals do 
exist; that if they be not approximated to at all, the whole 
matter goes to wreck! Infallibly. No bricklayer builds a 
wall perfectly perpendicular, mathematically this is not pos- 
sible; a certain degree of perpendicularity suffices him; and 



THE HERO AS KIMG. 219 

he, like a good bricklayer, "who must have done with his job, 
leaves it so. And yet if he sway too imtcJi from the perpen- 
dicular; above all, if he throw plummet and level quite away 
from him, and pile brick on brick heedless, just as it comes 
to hand — ! Such bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. He 
has forgotten himself : but the Law of Gravitation does not 
forget to act on him ; he and his wall rush down into con- 
fused welter of ruin ! 

This is the history of all rebellions, French Revolutions, 
social explosions in ancient or modern times. You have put 
the too 6';/able Man at the head of affairs ! The too ignoble, 
unvaliant, fatuous man. You have forgotten that there is 
any rule, or natural necessity whatever, of putting the Able 
Man there. Brick must lie on brick as it may and can. 
Unable Simulacrum of Ability, quack, in a word, must adjust 
himself with quack, in all manner of administration of human 
things; — which accordingly lie unadministered, fermenting 
into unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent misery: in 
the outward, and in the inward or spiritual, miserable mil- 
lions stretch out the hand for their due supply, and it is not 
there. The " law of gravitation " acts ; Nature's laws do 
none of them forget to act. The miserable miUions burst 
forth into Sansculottism, or some other sort of madness 
bricks and bricklayer lie as a fatal chaos ! 

Much sorry stuff, written some hundred years ago or more, 
about the " Divine right of Kings," moulders unread now in 
the Public Libraries of this country. Far be it from us to 
disturb the calm process by which it is disappearing harm- 
lessly from the earth, in those repositories ! At the same 
time, not to let the immense rubbish go without leaving us, 
as it ought, some soul of it behind — I will say that it did 
mean something ; something true, which it is important for 
us and all men to keep in mind. To assert that in whatever 



220 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

man 3011 chose to lay hold of (by this or the other plan of 
clutching at him); and clapt a round piece of metal on the 
head of, and called King, — there straightway came to reside 
a divine virtue, so that he became a kind of god, and a Divin- 
ity inspired him with faculty and right to rule over you to all 
lengths: this, — what can we do with this but leave it to rot 
silently in the Public Libraries ? But I will say withal, and 
that is what these Divine-right men meant, That in Kings, 
and in all human Authorities, and relations that men god- 
created can form among each other, there is verily either a 
Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong ; one or the other of 
these two ! For it is false altogether, what the last Sceptical 
Century taught us, that this world is a steam-engine. There 
is a God in this world ; and a God's sanction, or else the 
violation of such, does look out from all ruling and obedi- 
ence, from all moral acts of men. There is no act more 
moral between men than that of rule and obedience. Woe 
to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him 
that refuses it when it is ! God's law is in that, I say, how- 
ever the Parchment-laws may run : there is a Divine Right 
or else a Diabohc Wrong at the heart of every claim that 
one man makes upon another. 

It can do none of us harm to reflect on this : in all the 
relations of life it will concern us ; in Loyalty and Royalty, 
the highest of these. I esteem the modern error, That all 
goes by self-interest and the checking and balancing of 
greedy knaveries, and that, in short, there is nothing divine 
whatever in the association of men, a still more despicable 
error, natural as it is to an unbelieving century, than that of 
a "divine right" in people called Kings. I say, Find me the 
true Kontiijig., King, or Able-man, and he has 3. divine right 
over me. That we knew in some tolerable measure how to 
find him, and that all men were ready to acknowledge his 




DOUBT." Pn^e 221. 



, THE HERO AS KING. 221 

divine right when found : this is precisely the healing which 
a sick world is everywhere, in these ages, seeking after! 
The true King, as guide of the practical, has ever something 
of the Pontiff in him, — guide of the spiritual, from which 
all practice has its rise. This too is a true saying, That the 
Kmg\s head of the CJuwch. — But we will leave the Polemic 
stuff of a dead century to lie quiet on its book-shelves. 

Certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your Able- 
man to seek, and not knowing in what manner to proceed 
about it! That is the world's sad predicament in these 
times of ours. They are times of revolution, and have long 
been. The bricklayer with his bricks, no longer heedful of 
plummet or the law of gravitation, have toppled, tumbled, 
and it all welters as we see ! But the beginning of it was 
not the French Revolution; that is rather the end, we can 
hope. It were truer to say, the beginiimg was three centu- 
ries farther back : in the Reformation of Luther. That the 
thing: which still called itself Christian Church had become a 
Falsehood, and brazenly went about pretending to pardon 
men's sins for metallic coined money, and to do much else 
which in the everlasting truth of Nature it did no^ now do: 
here lay the vital malady. The inward being wrong, all out- 
ward went ever more and more wrong. Belief died away ; 
all was Doubt, Disbelief. The builder cas^ away his plum- 
met; said to himself, "What is gravitation? Brick lies on 
brick there ! " Alas, does it not still sound strange to many 
of us, the assertion that there is a God's-truth in the business 
of god-created men; that all is not a kind of grimace, an 
"expediency," diplomacy, one knows not what! 

From that first necessary assertion of Luther's, " You, self- 
styled Papa, you are no Father in God at all; you are — a 
Chimera, whom I know not how to name in polite language! " 



222 LECTURES ON HEROES. 



— from that onwards to the shout which rose round Camille 
Desmouhns in the Palais-Royal, '•'• Aiix armes / '''' \\\\Qn the 
people had burst up against all manner of Chimeras, — I find 
a natural historical sequence. That shout too, so frightful, 
half-infernal, was a great matter. Once more the voice of 
awakened nations; — starting confusedly, as out of night- 
mare, as out oi death-sleep, into some dim feeling that Life 
was real ; that God's world was not an expediency and 
diplomacy! Infernal; — yes, since they would not have it 
otherwise. Infernal, since not celestial or terrestrial ! Hoi- 
lowness, insincerity, has to cease; sincerity of some sort has 
to begin. Cost what it ma}^, reigns of terror, horrors of 
French Revolution or what else, we have to return to truth. 
Here is a Truth, as I said : a Truth clad in hellfire, since 
they would not but have it so ! 

A common theory among considerable parties of men in 
England and elsewhere used to be, that the French Nation 
had, in those days, as it were gone mad j that the French 
Revolution was a general act of insanit}-, a temporary con- 
version of France and large sections of the world into a kind 
of Bedlam. The Event had risen and raged ; but was a 
madness and nonentity, — gone now happily into the region 
of Dreams and the Picturesque ! — To such comfortable 
philosophers, the Three Days of July, 1830, must have been 
a surprising phenomenon. Here is the French Nation 
risen again, in musketry and death-struggle, out shooting 
and being shot, to make that same mad French Revolution 
good ! The sons and grandsons of those men, it would 
seem, persist in the enterprise : they do not disown it; they 
will have it made good ; will have themselves shot, if it be 
not made good ! To philosophers who had made up their 
life-system on that " madness " quietus, no phenomenon 
coulcl be more alarmmg. Poor Niebuhr, they say, the 



THE HERO AS KTNG. 223 

Prussian Professor and Historian, fell broken-hearted in 
consequence ; sickened, if we can believe it, and died of 
the Three Days ! It was surely not a very heroic death ; — 
little better than Racine's, dying because Louis Fourteenth 
looked sternly on him once. The world had stood some 
considerable shocks, in its time ; might have been expected 
to survive the Three Days too, and be found turning on its 
axis after even them ! The Three Days told all mortals 
that the old French Revolution, mad as it might look, was 
not a transitory ebullition of Bedlam, but a genuine product 
of this Earth where we all live ; that it was verily a Fact, 
and that the world in general would do well everywhere to 
regard it as such. 

Truly, without the French Revolution, one would not know 
what to make of an age like this at all. We will hail the 
French Revolution, as shipwrecked mariners might the stern- \ 
est rock, in a world otherwise all of baseless sea and waves. ' 
A true Apocalypse, though a terrible one, to this false with- 
ered artificial time ; testifying once more that Nature is 
pretem2XMX-A ; if not divine, then diabolic ; that Semblance 
is not Reality ; that it has to become Reality, or the world 
will take fire under it, — burn it into what it is, namely Noth- 
ing ! Plausibility has ended ; empty Routine has ended ; 
much has ended. This, as with a Trump of Doom, has 
been proclaimed to all men. They are the wisest who will 
learn it soonest. Long confused generations before it be 
learned ; peace impossible till it be ! The earnest man, 
surrounded, as ever, with a world of inconsistencies, can 
await patiently, patiently strive to do his work, in the midst 
of that. Sentence of Death is written down in Heaven 
against all that; sentence of Death is now proclaimed on 
the Earth against it : this he with his eyes may see. And 
surely, I should say, considering the other side of the matter, 



224 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

what enormous difficulties lie there, and how fast, fearfully 
fast, in all countries, the inexorable demand for solution of 
them is pressing on, — he may easily find other work to do 
than laboring in the Sansculottic province at this time of 
day! 

To me, in these circumstances, that of " Hero-worship " 
becomes a fact i nexpressibly precious ; the most solacing 
fact one sees in the world at present. There is an everlast- 
ing hope in it for the management of the world. Had all 
traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies, that men ever 
instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of 
Heroes being sent us ; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence 
Heroes when sent: it shines like a polestar through smoke- 
clouds, dust-clouds, and all manner of down-rushing and 
conflagration. 

Hero-worship would have sounded very strange to those 
workers and fighters in the French Revolution. Not rever- 
ence for Great Men ; not any hope or belief, or even wish, 
that Great Men could again appear in the world ! Nature, 
turned into a " Machine," was as if effete now ; could not 
any longer produce Great Men : — I can tell her, she may 
give up the trade altogether, then ; we cannot do without 
Great Men ! — But neither have I any quarrel with that of 
" Liberty and Equality ; " with the faith that, wise great men 
being impossible, a level immensity of foolish small men 
would suffice. It was a natural faith then and there. " Lib- 
erty and Equality ; no Authority needed any longer. Hero- 
worship, reverence for such Authorities, has proved false, is 
itself a falsehood ; no more of it ! We have had such for- 
geries^ we will now trust nothing. So many base plated 
coins passing in the market, the belief has now become 
common that no gold any longer exists, — and even that we 
can do very well without gold ! " I find this, among other 



THE HERO AS KING. 225 

things, in that universal cry of Liberty and Equahty ; and 
find it very natural, as matters then stood. 

And yet surely it is but the traiisitioii from false to true. 
Considered as the whole truth, it is false altogether ; the 
product of entire sceptical blindness, as yet only struggling 
to see. Hero-worship exists forever, and everywhere : not 
Loyalty alone ; it extends from divine adoration down to the 
lowest practical regions of life. " Bending before men," if 
it is not to be a mere empty grimace, better dispensed with 
than practised, is Hero-worship, — a recognition that there 
does dwell in that presence of our brother something divine ; 
that every created man, as Novalis said, is a "revelation in 
the Flesh." They were Poets too, that devised all those 
graceful courtesies which make life noble ! Courtesy is not 
a falsehood or grimace ; it need not be such. And Loyalty, 
religious Worship itself, are still possible ; nay still inevitable. 

May we not say, moreover, while so many of our late 
Heroes have worked rather as revolutionary men, that 
nevertheless every Great Man, every genuine man, is by the 
nature of him a son of Order, not of Disorder.'* It is a 
tragical position for a true man to w^ork in revolutions. He 
seems an anarchist; and indeed a painful element of anarchy 
does incumber him at every step, — him to whose whole soul 
anarchy is hostile, hateful. His mission is Order ; every 
man's is. He is here to make what was disorderly, chaotic, 
into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of Order. 
Is not all work of man in this world a making of Order? 
The carpenter finds rough trees ; shapes them, constrains 
them into square fitness, into purpose and use. We are all 
born enemies of Disorder : it is tragical for us all to be con- 
cerned in image-breaking and down-pulling; for the Great 
Man, 7nore a man than we, it is doubly tragical. 

Thus too all human things, maddest French Sansculot 



2 26 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

tisms, do and must work towards Order. I say, there is not 
a man in them, raging in the thickest of the madness, but is 
impelled withal, at all moments, towards Order. His very 
life means that ; Disorder is dissolution, death. No chaos 
but it seeks a centre to revolve round. While man is man, 
some Cromwell or Napoleon is the necessary finish of a 
Sansculottism, — Curious : in those days when Hero-worship 
was the most incredible thing to every one, how it does come 
out nevertheless, and assert itself practically, in a way which 
all have to credit. Divine rights take it on the great scale, 
is found to mean divine might withal ! While old false 
Formulas are getting trampled everywhere into destruction, 
new genuine Substances unexpectedly unfold themselves 
indestructible. In rebellious ages, when Kingship itself 
seems dead and abolished, Cromwell, Napoleon, step forth 
again as Kings. The history of these men is what we have 
now to look at, as our last phasis of Heroism. The old 
ages are brought back to us; the manner in which Kings 
were made, and Kingship itself first took rise, is again 
exhibited in the history of these Two. 

We have had many civil wars in England ; wars of Red 
and White Roses, wars of Simon de Montfort; wars enough, 
which are not very memorable. But that war of the Puritans 
has a significance which belongs to no one of the others. 
Trusting to your candor, which will suggest on the other 
side what I have not room to say, I will call it a section once 
more of that great universal war which alone makes up the 
true History of the World, — the war of Belief against Un- 
belief ! The struggle of men intent on the real essence 
ot things, against men intent on the semblances and forms of 
things. The Puritans, to many, seem mere savage Icono- 
clasts, fierce destroyers of Forms ; but it were more just to 



I 



THE HERO AS KING. 22/ 

call them haters of untrue Forms. I hope we know how 
to respect Laud and his King as well as them. Poor Laud 
seems to me to have been weak and ill-starred, not dishon- 
est ; an unfortunate Pedant rather than any thing worse. 
His " Dreams " and superstitions, at which they laugh so, 
have an affectionate, lovable kind of character. He is like 
a College-Tutor, whose whole world is forms, College-rules ; 
whose notion is that these are the hfe and safety of the 
world. He is placed suddenly, with that unalterable luckless 
notion of his, at the head not of a College, but of a Nation, 
to regulate the most complex deep-reaching interests of men. 
He thinks they ought to go by the old decent regulations ; 
nay that their salvation will lie in extending and improving 
these. Like a weak man, he drives with spasmodic vehe- 
mence towards his purpose ; cramps himself to it, heeding no 
voice of prudence, no cry of pity: He will have his College- 
rules obeyed by his Collegians ; that first ; and till that, 
nothing. He is an ill-starred Pedant, as I said. He would 
have it the world was a College of that kind, and the world 
was not that. Alas, was not his doom stern enough ? 
Whatever wrongs he did, were they not all frightfully 
avenged on him.'^ 

It is rneritorious to insist on forms; Religion and all else 
naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed 
world is the only habitable one. The naked formlessness 
of Puritanism is not the thing I praise in the Puritans ; it is 
the thing I pity, — praising only the spirit which had rendered 
that inevitable ! All substances clothe themselves in forms; 
but there are suitable true forms, and then there are untrue 
unsuitable. As the briefest definition, one might say, Forms 
which grow round a substance, if we rightly understand that, 
will correspond to the real nature and purport of it, will be 
true, good ; forms which are consciously put round a sub- 



228 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

stance, bad. I invite you to reflect on this. It distinguishes 
true from false in Ceremonial Form, earnest solemnity from 
empty pageant, in all human things. 

There must be a veracity, a natural spontaneity in forms. 
In the commonest meeting of men, a person making, what 
we call, " set speeches," is not he an offence ? In the mere 
drawing-room, whatsoever courtesies you see to be grimaces, 
prompted by no spontaneous reality within, are a thing you 
wish to get away from. But suppose now it were some 
matter of vital concernment, some transcendent matter (as 
Divine Worship is), about which your whole soul, struck 
dumb with its excess of feeling, knew not how to form itself 
into utterance at all, and preferred formless silence to any 
utterance there possible, — what should we say of a man 
coming forward to represent or utter it for you in the way 
of upholsterer-mummery ? Such a man, — let him depart 
swiftly, if he love himself ! You have lost your only son ; 
are mute, struck down, without even tears : an importunate 
man importunately offers to celebrate Funeral Games for 
him in the manner of the Greeks ! Such mummery is not 
only not to be accepted, — it is hateful, unendurable. It is 
what the old Prophets called " Idolatry," worshipping of 
hollow shows J what all earnest men do and will reject. We 
can partly understand what those poor Puritans meant. 
Laud dedicating that St. Catherine Creed's Church, in the 
manner we have it described ; with his multiplied ceremonial 
bowings, gesticulations, exclamations : surely it is rather the 
rigorous formal Pedant, intent on his " College-rules," than 
the earnest Prophet, intent on the essence of the matter ! 

Puritanism found sicch forms insupportable ; trampled on 
such forms ; — we have to excuse it for saying, No form at 
all rather than such ! It stood preaching in its bare pulpit, 
with nothing but the Bible in its hand. Nay, a man preach 



THE HERO AS KING. 22g 

ing from his earnest .r^?// into the earnest sou/s of men: is 
not this virtually the essence of all Churches whatsoever? 
The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any 
semblance, however dignified. Besides, it will clothe itself 
with due semblance by and by, if it be real. No fear of that ; 
actually no fear at all. Given the living 7na//, there will be 
found clothes for him; he will find himself clothes. But the 
suit of clothes pretending that // is both clothes and man — ! 
— We cannot " fight the French " by three hundred thousand 
red uniforms : there must be men in the inside of them ! 
Semblance, I assert, must actually not divorce itself from 
Reality. If Semblance do, — why then there must be men 
found to rebel against Semblance, for it has become a lie ! 
These two Antagonisms at war here, in the case of Laud 
and the Puritans, are as old nearly as the world. They went 
to fierce battle over England in that age ; and fought out 
their confused controversy to a certain length, with many 
results for all of us. 

In the age which directly followed that of the Puritans, 
their cause or themselves were little likely to have justice 
done them. Charles Second and his Rochesters were not 
the kind of men you would set to judge what the worth or 
meaning of such men might have been. That there could 
be any faith or truth in the life of a man, was what these 
poor Rochesters, and the age they ushered in, had forgotten. 
Puritanism was hung on gibbets, — like the bones of the 
leading Puritans. Its work nevertheless went on accom- 
plishing itself. All true work of a man, hang the author of 
it on what gibbet you like, must and will accomplish itself. 
We have our Habeas-Corpiis^ our free Representation of the 
People ; acknowledgment, wide as the world, that all men 
are, or else must, shall, and will become, what we call free 



230 LECTURES OAT HEkOES. 

men; — men with their life grounded on reality and justice, 
not on tradition, which has become unjust and a chimera! 
This in part, and much besides this, was the work of the 
Puritans. 

And indeed, as these things became gradually manifest, 
the character of the Puritans began to clear itself. Their 
memories were, one after another, taken •rt'd^w;^ from the gib- 
bet; nay a certain portion of them are now, in these days, 
as good as canonized. Eliot, Hampden, Pym, nay Ludlow, 
Hutchinson, Vane himself, are admitted to be a kind of 
Heroes ; political Conscript Fathers, to whom in no small 
degree we owe what makes us a free England: it would not 
be safe for anybody to designate these men as wicked now. 
Few Puritans of note but find their apologists somewhere, 
and have a certain reverence paid them by earnest men. One 
Puritan, I think, and almost he alone, our poor Cromwell, 
seems to hang yet on the gibbet, and find no hearty apolo- 
gist anywhere. Him neither saint nor sinner will acquit of 
great wickedness. A man of ability, infinite talent, courage 
and so forth : but he betrayed the Cause. Selfish ambition, 
dishonesty, duplicity; a fierce, coarse, hypocritical Tartufe; 
turning all that noble Struggle for constitutional Liberty into 
a sorry farce played for his own benefit : this and worse is 
the character they give of Cromwell. And then there come 
contrasts with Washington and others ; above all, with these 
noble Pyms and Hampdens, whose noble work he stole for 
himself, and ruined into a futility and deformity. 

This view of Cromwell seems to me the not unnatural 
product of a century like the Eighteenth. As we said of the 
Valet, so of the Sceptic: He does not know a Hero when he 
sees him ! The Valet expected purple mantles, gilt sceptres, 
body-guards and flourishes of trumpets: the Sceptic of the 
Eighteenth century looks for regulated respectable Formulas, 




"THE KUGCED OUTCAST CKOMWEI.L."— /^^J^(,' 231. 



THE HERO AS KING, 23 1 

" Principles," or what else he may call them ; a style of 
speech and conduct which has got to seem " respectable," 
which can plead for itself in a handsome articulate manner, 
and gain the suffrages of an enlightened sceptical Eighteenth 
century ! It is, at bottom, the same thing that both the 
Valet and he expect: the garnitures of some acknowledged 
royalty, which then they will acknowledge ! The King com- 
ing to them in the rugged ?/«formulistic state shall be no 
King. 

For my own share, far be it from me to say or insinuate a 
word of disparagement against such characters as Hampden, 
Eliot, Pym; whom I believe to have been right worthy and 
useful men. I have read diligently what books and docu- 
ments about them I could come at; — with the honestest 
wish to admire, to love and worship them like Heroes ; but 
I am sorry to say, if the real truth must be told, with very 
indifferent success ! At bottom, I found that it would not do. 
They are very noble men, these ; step along in their stately 
way, with their measured euphemisms, philosophies, parlia- 
mentary eloquences, Ship-moneys, Monarchies of Man; a 
most constitutional, unblamable, dignified set of men. But 
the heart remains cold before them ; the fancy alone endeav- 
ors to get up some worship of them. What man's heart 
does, in reality, break forth into any fire of brotherly love 
for these men? They are become dreadfully dull men! 
One breaks down often enough in the constitutional elo- 
quence of the admirable Pym, with his "seventhly and lastly." 
You find that it may be the admirablest thing in the world, 
but that it is heavy, — heavy as lead, barren as brick-clay; 
that, in a word, for you there is little or nothing now surviv- 
ing there ! One leaves all these Nobilities standing in their 
niche-s of honor : the rugged outcast Cromwell, he is the 
man of them all in whom one still finds human stuff. The 



2^2 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

great savage Baresark : he could write no euphemistic Mon- 
archy of Man; did not speak, did not work witli ghb regu- 
larity, had no straight story to tell for himself anywhere. 
But he stood bare, not cased in euphemistic coat-of-mail ; he 
grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the 
naked truth of things ! That, after all, is the sort of man for 
one. I plead guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other 
sorts of men. Smooth-shaven Respectabilities not a few one 
unds, that are not good for much. Small thanks to a man 
for keeping his hands clean, who would not touch the work 
but with gloves on ! 

Neither, on the whole, does this constitutional tolerance 
of the Eighteenth century for the other happier Puritans 
seem to be a very great matter. One might say, it is but a 
piece of Formulism and Scepticism, like the rest. They 
tell us, It was a sorrowful thing to consider that the foun- 
dation of our English Liberties should have been laid by 
" Superstition." These Puritans came forward with Calvin- 
istic incredible Creeds, Anti-Laudisms, Westminster Con- 
fessions; demanding, chiefly of all, that they should have 
liberty to worship in their own way. Liberty to tax them- 
selves : that was the thing they should have demanded ! 
It was Superstition, Fanaticism, disgraceful ignorance of 
Constitutional Philosophy, to insist on the other thing! — 
Liberty to tax one's self? Not to pay out money from your 
pocket except on reason shown 1 No century, I think, but 
a rather barren one would have fixed on that as the first 
right of man ! I should say, on the contrary, A just man 
will generally have better cause than tnoney in what shape 
soever, before deciding to revolt against his Government. 
Ours is a most confused world; in which a good man will 
be thankful to see any kind of Government maintain itself 
in a not insupportable manner: and here in England, to this 



THE Hero as k'lNC. ^33 

hour, if he is not ready to pay a great many taxes which he can 
see very small reason in, it will not go well with him, I think ! 
He must try some other climate than this. Tax-gatherer? 
Money? He will say: "Take my money, since you can^ 
and it is so desirable to you; take it, — and take yourself 
away with it ; and leave me alone to my work here. / am 
still here ; can still work, after all the money you have taken 
from me ! " But if they come to him, and say, " Acknowledge 
a Lie ; pretend to say you are worshipping God, when you 
are not doing it: believe not the thing tha.t jyo2i find true, but 
the thing that I find, or pretend to find true ! " He will 
answer : " No ; by God's help, no ! You may take my purse ; 
but I cannot have my moral Self annihilated. The purse is 
any Highwayman's who might meet me with a loaded pistol : 
but the Self is mine and God my Maker's ; it is not yours ; 
and I will resist you to the death, and revolt against you, and, 
on the whole, front all manner of extremities, accusations 
and confusions, in defence of that ! " 

Really, it seems to me the one reason which could justify 
revolting, this of the Puritans. It has been the soul of all 
just revolts among men. Not Hunger alone produced even 
the French Revolution ; no, but the feeling of the insupport- 
able all-pervading I^a/se/wod which had now embodied itself 
in Hunger, in universal material Scarcity and Nonentity, and 
thereby become indispiUably false in the eyes of all ! We 
will leave the Eighteenth century with its "hberty to tax 
itself." We will not astonish ourselves that the meaning of 
such men as the Puritans remained dim to it. To men who 
believe in no reality at all, how shall a real human soul, the 
intensest of all realities, as it were the Voice of this world's 
Maker still speaking to ?/j-, — be intelligible? What it cannot 
reduce into constitutional doctrines relative to "taxing," or 
other the like material interest, gross, palpable to the sense, 



234 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

such a century will needs reject as an amorphous heap of 
rubbish. Hampdens, Pyms and Ship-money will be the 
theme of much constitutional eloquence, striving to be 
fervid; — which will glitter, if not as fire does, then as ice 
does_: and the irreducible Cromwell will remain a chaotic 
mass of " madness," " hypocrisy," and much else. 

From of old, I will confess, this theory of Cromwell's 
falsity has been incredible to me. Nay I cannot believe the 
like, of any Great Man whatever. Multitudes of Great Men 
figure in History as false selfish men ; but if we will consider 
it, they are hvX figures for us, unintelligible shadows ; we do 
not see into them as men that could have existed at all. A 
superficial unbelieving generation only, with no eye but for 
the surfaces and semblances of things, could form such 
notions of Great Men. Can a great soul be possible without 
a conscience in it, the essence of all r^^/ souls, great or small ? 
— No, we cannot figure Cromwell as a Falsity and Fatuity ; 
the longer I study him and his career, I believe this the less. 
Why should we ? There is no evidence of it. Is it not 
strange that, after all the mountains of calumny this man 
has been subject to, after being represented as the very 
prince of liars, who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, but 
always some cunning counterfeit of truth, there should not 
yet have been one falsehood brought clearly home to him ? 
A prince of liars, and no he spoken by him. Not one that 
I could yet get sight of. It is like Pococke asking Grotius, 
Where \?, ^owx proof oi Mahomet's Pigeon? No proof! — 
Let us leave all these calumnious chimeras, as chimeras 
ought to be left. They are not portraits of the man ; they 
are distracted phantasms of him, the joint product of hatred 
and darkness. 

Looking at the man's life with our own eyes, it seems to 



THE HERO AS KINO, 235 

me, a very different hypothesis suggests itself. What Httle 
we know of his earher obscure years, distorted as it has 
come down to us, does it not all betoken an earnest, affec- 
tionate, sincere kind of man ? His nervous melancholic 
temperament indicates rather a seriousness too deep for him. 
Of those stories of " Spectres : " of the white Spectre in 
broad daylight, predicting that he should be King of Eng- 
land, we are not bound to believe much ; — probably no more 
than of the other black Spectre, or Devil in person, to whom 
the Officer saw him sell himself before Worcester Fight ! 
But the mournful, over-sensitive, hypochondriac humor of 
Oliver, in his young years, is otherwise indisputably known. 
The Huntingdon Physician told Sir Phihp Warwick himself, 
He had often been sent for at midnight ; Mr, Cromwell 
was full of hypochondria, thought himself near dying, and 
" had fancies about the Town-cross." These things are 
significant. Such an excitable deep-feeling nature, in that 
rugged stubborn strength of his, is not the symptom of 
falsehood; it is the symptom and promise of quite other 
than falsehood ! 

The young Oliver is sent to study Law ; falls, or is said to 
have fallen, for a little period, into some of the dissipations 
of youth ; but if so, speedily repents, abandons all this : not 
much above twenty, he is married, settled as an altogether 
grave and quiet man. " He pays back what money he had 
won at gambling," says the story ; — he does not think any 
gain of that kind could be really his. It is very interesting, 
very natural, this " conversion," as they well name it ; this 
awakening of a great true soul from the worldly slough, to 
see into the awful truth of things ; — to see that Time and 
its shows all rested on Eternity, and this poor earth of ours 
was the threshold either of Heaven or of Hell ! Oliver's 
life at St. Ives and Ely, as a sober industrious Farmer, is 



236 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

it not altogether as that of a true and devout man ? He has 
renounced the world and its ways ; its prizes are net the 
thing that can enrich him. He tills the earth ; he reads 
his Bible; daily assembles his servants round him to wor- 
ship God. He comforts persecuted ministers, is fond of 
preachers ; nay can himself preach, — exhorts his neighbors 
to be wise, to redeem the time. In all this what " hypocrisy," 
" ambition," " cant,'' or other falsity ? The man's hopes, I 
do believe, were fixed on the other Higher World ; his aim to 
get well thither., by walking well through his humble course 
in this world. He courts no notice: what could notice here 
do for him ? " Ever in his great Taskmaster's eye." 

It is striking, too, how he comes out once into public 
view ; he, since no other is willing to come : in resistance to 
a public grievance. I mean, in that matter of the Bedford 
Fens. No one else will go to law with Authority; therefore 
he will. That matter once settled, he returns back into 
obscurity, to his Bible and his Plough. " Gain influence " ? 
His influence is the most legitimate ; derived from personal 
knowledge of him, as a just, religious, reasonable and deter- 
mined man. In this way he has lived till past forty; old 
age is now in view of him, and the earnest portal of Death 
and Eternity ; it was at this point that he suddenly became 
" ambitious " ! I do not interpret his Parliamentary mission 
in that way ! 

His successes in Parliament, his successes through the 
war, are honest successes of a brave man ; who has more 
resolution in the heart of him, more hght in the head of him, 
than other men. His prayers to God ; his spoken thanks to 
the God of Victory, who had preserved him safe, and carried 
him forward so far, through the furious clash of a world all 
set in conflict, through desperate-looking envelopments at 
Dunbar ; through the death-hail of so many battles ; mercy 



THE HERO AS KING. 237 

after mercy ; to the " crowning mercy " of Worcester Fight : 
all this is good and genuine for a deep-hearted Calvinistic 
Cromwell. Only to vain unbelieving Cavaliers, worshipping 
not God but their own "love-locks," frivolities and formali- 
ties, living quite apart from contemplations of God, living 
without God in the world, need it seem hypocritical. 

Nor will his participation in the King's death involve him 
in condemnation with us. It is a stern business killing of a 
King! But if you once go to war with him, it lies there; 
this and all else lies there. Once at war, you have, made 
wager of battle with him : it is he to die, or else you. Rec- 
onciliation is problematic ; may be possible, or, far more 
likely, is impossible. It is now pretty generally admitted 
that the Parliament, having vanquished Charles First, had 
no way of making any tenable arrangement with him. The 
large Presbyterian party, apprehensive now of the Independ- 
ents, were most anxious to do so ; anxious indeed as for 
their own existence ; but it could not be. The unhappy 
Charles, in those final Hampton-Court negotiations, shows 
himself as a man fatally incapable of being dealt with, A 
man who, once for all, could not and would not understand : 
— whose thought did not in any measure represent to him 
the real fact of the matter; nay worse, whose word dXdi not 
at all represent his thought. We may say this of liim with- 
out cruelty, with deep pity rather : but it is true and undeni- 
able. Forsaken there of all but the name of Kingship, he 
still, finding himself treated with outward respect as a King, 
fancied that he might play off party against party, and smug- 
gle himself into his old power by deceiving both. Alas, they 
both discovered "Cc^dX he was deceiving them. A man whose 
word will not inform you at all what he means or wiU do, is 
not a man you can bargain with. You must get out of that 
man's way, or put him out of yours ! The Presbyterians, in 



238 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

their despair, were still for believing Charles, though found 
false, unbelievable again and again. Not so Cromwell : *' For 
all our fighting," says he, "we are to have a little bit of 
paper ? " No ! 

In fact, everywhere we have to note the decisive practical 
eye of this man ; how he drives towards the practical and 
practicable ; has a genuine insight into what is fact. Such an 
intellect, I maintain, does not belong to a false man : the false 
man sees false shows, plausibilities, expediences : the true 
man is needed to discern even practical truth. Cromwell's 
advice about the Parliament's Army, early in the contest, 
How they were to dismiss their city-tapsters, flimsy riotous 
persons, and choose substantial yeomen, whose heart was in 
the work, to be soldiers for thern : this is advice by a man 
who saw. Fact answers, if you see into Fact ! Cromwell's 
Ironsides were the embodiment of this insight of his ; men 
fearing God ; and without any other fear. No more conclu- 
sively genuine set of fighters ever trod the soil of England, 
or of any other land. 

Neither will we blame greatly that word of Cromwell's to 
them ; which was so blamed : " If the King should meet me 
in battle, I would kill the King." Why not ? These words 
were spoken to men who stood as before a Higher than 
Kings. They had set more than their own lives on the cast. 
The Parliament may call it, in official language, a fighting 
'-'■for the King ; " but we, for our share, cannot understand 
that. To us it is no dilettante work, no sleek officiality; it 
is sheer rough death and earnest. They have brought it to 
the calling-forth of War; horrid internecine fight, man grap- 
pling with man in fire-eyed rage, — the infernal element in 
man called forth, to try it by that ! Do that therefore ; since 
that is the thing to be done. — The successes of Cromwell 
seem to me a very natural thing! Since he was not shot in 



I 



¥ 



THE HERO AS KING. 239 

battle, they were an inevitable thing. That such a man, 
with the eye to see, with the heart to dare, should advance, 
from post to post, from victory to victory, till the Huntingdon 
Farmer became, by whatever name you might call him, the 
acknowledged Strongest Man in England, virtually the King 
of England, requires no magic to explain it ! 

Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall 
into Scepticism, into dilettantism, insincerity; not to know 
a Sincerity when they see it. For this world, and for all 
worlds, what curse is so fatal ? The heart lying dead, the 
eye cannot see. What intellect remains is merely the vulpi?ie 
intellect. That a true King be sent them is of small use ; 
they do not know him when sent. They say scornfully. Is 
this your King? The Hero wastes his heroic faculty in 
bootless contradiction from the unworthy; and can accom- 
plish little. For himself he does accomplish a heroic life, 
which is much, which is all ; but for the world he accom- 
plishes comparatively nothing. The wild rude Sincerity, 
direct from Nature, is not glib in answering from the wit- 
ness-box : in your svazW-d^hX pie-powder court, he is scouted 
as a counterfeit. The vulpine intellect "detects " him. For 
being a man worth any thousand men, the response your 
Knox, your Cromwell gets, is an argument for two centuries 
whether he was a man at all. God's greatest gift to this 
Earth is sneeringly flung away. The miraculous talisman is 
a paltry plated coin, not fit to pass in the shops as a common 
guinea. 

Lamentable this ! I say, this must be remedied. Till this 
be remedied in some measure, there is nothing remedied. 
" Detect quacks " ? Yes do, for Heaven's sake ; but know 
withal the, men that are to be trusted ! Till we know that, 
what is all our knowledge ; how shall we even so much as 
"detect".'' For the vulpine sharpnes.s, which considers 



240 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

itself to be knowledge ; and "detects " in that fashion, is far 
mistaken. Dupes indeed are many : but, of all dupes, there 
is none so fatally situated as he who lives in undue terror of 
being duped. The world does exist ; the world has truth in 
it, or it would not exist ! First recognize what is true, we 
shall then discern what is false ; and properly never till then. 

" Know the men that are to be trusted : " alas, this is yet, 
in these days, very far from us. The sincere alone can 
recognize sincerity. Not a Hero only is needed, but a world 
fit for him ; a world not of Valets ; — the Hero comes almost 
in vain to it otherwise ! Yes, it is far from us : but it must 
come ; thank God, it is visibly coming. Till it do come, 
what have we? Ballot-boxes, suffrages, French Revolu- 
tions: — if we are as Valets, and do not know the Hero 
when we see him, what good are all these? A heroic 
Cromwell comes ; and for a hundred and fifty years he can- 
not have a vote from us. Why, the insincere, unbelieving 
world is the natin^al property of the Quack, and of the 
Father of quacks and quackeries ! Misery, confusion, 
unveracity, are alone possible there. By ballot-boxes we 
alter the figure of our Quack ; but the substance of him 
continues. The Valet-World has to be governed by the 
Sham-Hero, by the King merely dressed in King-gear. It 
is his; he is its! In brief, one of two things: We shall 
either learn to know a Hero, a true Governor and Captain, 
somewhat better, when we see him ; or else go on to be 
forever governed by the Unheroic ; — had we ballot-boxes 
clattering at every street-corner, there were no remedy in 
these. 

Poor Cromwell, — great Cromwell ! The inarticulate 
Prophet; Prophet who could not speak. Rude, confused, 
struggling to utter himself, with his savage depth, with his 
wild sincerity ; and he looked so strange, among the elegant 



THE HERO AS KING. 24 1 

Euphemisms, dainty little Falklands, didactic Chillingworths, 
diplomatic Clarendons ! Consider him. An outer hull of 
chaotic confusion, visions of the Devil, nervous dreams, 
almost semi-madness ; and yet such a clear determinate 
man's-energy vv^orking in the heart of that. A kind of 
chaotic man. The ray as of pure starlight and fire, working 
in such an element of boundless hypochondria, ^/^formed 
black of darkness ! And yet withal this hypochondria, what 
was it but the very greatness of the man ? The depth and 
tenderness of his wild affections : the quantity of sympathy 
he had with things, — the quantity of insight he would yet 
get into the heart of things, the mastery he would yet get 
over things: this was his hypochondria. The man's misery, 
as man's misery always does, came of his greatness. Samuel 
Johnson too is that kind of man. Sorrow-stricken, half- 
distracted ; the wide element of mournful black enveloping 
him, — wide as the world. It is the character of a prophetic 
man ; a man with his whole soul seeing^ and struggling to 
see. 

On this ground, too, I explain to myself Cromwell's reputed 
confusion of speech. To himself the internal meaning was 
sun-clear ; but the material with which he was to clothe it 
in utterance was not there. He had lived silent ; a great 
unnamed sea of Thought round him all his days ; and in his 
way of life little call to attempt iianiing or uttering that. 
With his sharp power of vision, resolute power of action, I 
doubt not he could have learned to write Books withal, and 
speak fluently enough ; — he did harder things than writing 
of Books. This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for 
doing manfully all things you will set him on doing. Intel- 
lect is not speaking and logicizing; it is seeing and ascer- 
taining. Virtue, Vir-tns, manhood, hero-hooA, is not fair- 
spoken immaculate regularity ; it is first of all, what the 



242 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Germans well name it, Tugettd {Taiigetid^ dow-\ng or Dough- 
tiness), Courage and the Faculty to do. This basis of the 
matter Cromwell had in him. 

One understands moreover how, though he could not speak 
in Parliament, he might preach, rhapsodic preaching ; above 
all, how he might be great in extempore prayer. These are 
the free outpouring utterances of what is in the heart : method 
is not required in them ; warmth, depth, sincerity, are all that 
is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer is a notable feature 
of him. All his great enterprises were commenced with 
prayer. In dark inextricable-looking difficulties, his Officers 
and he used to assemble, and pray alternately, for hours, for 
days, till some definite resolution rose among them, some 
" door of hope," as they would name it, disclosed itself. 
Consider that. In tears, in fervent prayers, and cries to the 
great God, to have pity on them, to make His light shine 
before them. They, armed Soldiers of Christ, as they felt 
themselves to be ; a little band of Christian Brothers, who 
had drawn the sword against a great black devouring world 
not Christian, but Mammonish, Devilish, — they cried to 
God in their straits, in their extreme need, not to forsake 
the Cause that was His. The light which now rose upon 
them, — how could a human soul, by any means at all, get 
better light? Was not the purpose so formed like to be 
precisely the best, wisest, the one to be followed without 
hesitation any more ? To them it was as the shining of 
Heaven's own Splendor in the waste-howling darkness ; the 
Pillar of Fire by night, that was to guide them on their 
desolate perilous way. Was it not such 1 Can a man's 
soul, to this hour, get guidance by any other method than 
intrinsically by that same, — devout prostration of the earnest 
struggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all Light; 
be such prayer a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless. 



THE HERO AS KING. 243 

inarticulate one ? There is no other method. " Hypocrisy " ? 
One begins to be weary of all that. They who call it so, 
have no right to speak on such matters. They never formed 
a purpose, what one can call a purpose. They went about 
balancing expediencies, plausibilities ; gathering votes, ad- 
vices ; they never were alone with the trtith of a thing at 
all. — Cromwell's prayers were likely to be " eloquent," and 
much more than that. His was the heart of a man who 
could pray. 

But indeed his actual Speeches, I apprehend, were not 
nearly so ineloquent, incondite, as they look. We find he 
was, what all speakers aim to be, an impressive speaker, 
even in Parliament; one who, from the first, had weight. 
With that rude passionate voice of his, he was always under- 
stood to 7nean something, and men wished to know what. 
He disregarded eloquence, nay despised and disliked it; 
spoke always without premeditation of the words he was to 
use. The Reporters, too, in those days seem to have been 
singularly candid ; and to have given the Printer precisely 
what they found on their own notepaper. And withal, what 
a strange proof is it of Cromwell's being the premeditative 
ever-calculating hypocrite, acting a play before the world, 
That to the last he took no more charge of his Speeches ! 
How came he not to study his words a little, before flinging 
them out to the public? If the words were true words, they 
could be left to shift for themselves. 

But with regard to Cromwell's " lying," we will make one 
remark. This, I suppose, or something like this, to have 
been the nature of it. All parties found themselves deceived 
in him ; each party understood him to be meaning this., heard 
him even say so, and behold he turns out to have been mean- 
ing that ! He was, cry they, the chief of liars. But now, 
intrinsically, is not all this the inevitably fortune, not of a 



244 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

false man in such times, but simply of a superior man? 
Such a man must have reticences in him. If he walk wearing 
his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at, his journey 
will not extend far ! There is no use for any man's taking up 
his abode in a house built of glass. A man always is to be 
himself the judge how much of his mind he will show to 
other men ; even to those he would have work along with 
him. There are impertinent inquiries made : your rule is, 
to leave the inquirer ?^;dnformed on that matter ; not, if you 
can help it, ;^2>informed, but precisely as dark as he was ! 
This, could one hit the right phrase of response, is what 
the wise and faithful man would aim to answer in such a 
case. 

Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in the dialect of 
small subaltern parties ; uttered to them 2. part of his mind. 
Each little party thought him all its own. Hence their rage, 
one and all, to find him not of their party, but of his own 
party! Was it his blame? At all seasons of his history he 
must have felt, among such people, how, if he explained to 
them the deeper insight he had, they must either have shud- 
dered aghast at it, or believing it, their own little compact 
hypothesis must have gone wholly to wreck. They could 
not have worked in his province any more ; nay perhaps they 
could not now have worked in their o.wn province. It is the 
inevitable position of a great man among small men. Small 
men, most active, useful, are to be seen everywhere, whose 
whole activity depends on some conviction which to you is 
palpably a limited one; imperfect, what we call an error. 
But would it be a kindness always, is it a duty always or 
often, to disturb them in that? Many a man, doing loud 
work in the world, stands only on some thin traditionahty, 
conventionality ; to him indubitable, to you incredible : break 
that beneath him, he sink§ to endless depths ! " I might 



THE HERO AS KING. 245 

have my hand full of truth," said Fontenelle, "and open only 
my little finger." 

And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how 
much more in all departments of practice ! He that cannot 
withal keep his mind to himself cannot practise any consid- 
erable thing whatever. And we call it " dissimulation," all 
this .'' What would you think of calling the general of an 
army a dissembler because he did not tell every corporal and 
private soldier, who pleased to put the question, what his 
thoughts were about every thing ? — Cromwell, I should 
rather say, managed all this in a manner we must admire 
for its perfection. An endless vortex of such questioning 
"corporals" rolled confusedly round him through his whole 
course ; whom he did answer. It must have been as a great 
true-seeing man that he managed this too. Not one proved 
falsehood, as I said ; not one ! Of what man that ever 
wound himself through such a coil of things will you say so 
much '^. — 

But in fact there are two errors, widely prevalent, which 
pervert to the very basis our judgments formed about such 
men as Cromwell; about their "ambition," "falsity," and 
suchHke. The first is what I might call substituting the goal 
of their career for the course and starting-point of it. The 
vulgar Historian of a Cromwell fancies that he had deter- 
mined on being Protector of England, at the time when he 
was ploughing the marsh lands of Cambridgeshire. His ca- 
reer lay all mapped out: a programme of the whole drama; 
which he then step by step dramatically unfolded, with all 
manner of cunning, deceptive dramaturgy, as he went on, — 
the hollow, scheming 'TnoKpiT?]^, or Play-actor, that he was ! 
This is a radical perversion ; all but universal in such cases. 
And think for an instant how different the fact is ! How 



24-6 LECTURES OK^ HEROES. 

mucii does one of ?/i- foresee of his own life? Short way 
ahead of us it is all dim; an ?^«wound skein of possibili- 
ties, of apprehensions, attemptabilities, vague-looming hopes. 
This Cromwell had not his life lying all in that fashion of 
Programme, which he needed then, with that unfathomable 
cunning of his, only to enact dramatically, scene after scene ! 
Not so. We see it so ; but to him it was in no measure so. 
What absurdities would fail away of themselves, were this 
one undeniable fact kept honestly in view by History ! His- 
torians indeed will tell you that they do keep it in view ; — • 
but look whether such is practically the fact ! Vulgar His- 
tory, as in this Cromwell's case, omits it altogether; even the 
best kinds of History only remember it now and then. To 
remember it duly with rigorous perfection, as in the fact it 
stood, requires indeed a rare faculty ; rare, nay impossible. 
A very Shakspeare for faculty ; or more than Shakspeare ; 
who could enact a brother man's biography, see with the 
brother man's eyes at all points of his course what things he 
saw; in short, know his course and him, as few " Historians " 
are like to do. Half or more of all the thick-plied perver- 
sions which distort our image of Cromwell, will disappear, 
if we honestly so much as try to represent them so ; in 
sequence, as they were ; not in the lump, as they are thrown 
down before us. 

But a second error, which I think the generality commit, 
refers to this same " ambition " itself. We exaggerate the 
ambition of Great Men ; we mistake what the nature of it is. 
Great Men are not ambitious in that sense; he is a small 
poor man that is ambitious so. Examine the man who lives 
in misery because he does not shine above other men ; 
who goes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about 
his gifts and claims ; struggling to force everybody, as it 
were begging everybody for God's sake, to acknowledge him 



THE HEkO AS KING. 247 

a great man, and set him over the heads of men ! Such a 
creature is amons^ the wretchedest siohts seen under this 
sun. A great man ? A poor morbid prurient empty man ; 
fitter for the ward of a hospital, than for a throne among men. 
I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on 
quiet paths ; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, 
write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the empti- 
ness of the man, not his greatness. Because there is nothing 
in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find some- 
thing in him. In good truth, I believe no great man, not so 
much as a genuine man who had health and real substance 
in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in 
this way. 

Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be "noticed" 
by noisy crowds of people ? God his Maker already noticed 
him. He, Cromwell, was already there; no notice would 
make - liim other than he already was. Till his hair was 
grown gray; and Life from the downhill slope was all seen 
to be Hmited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable 
matter how it went, — he had been content to plough the 
ground, and read his Bible. He in his old days could not 
support it any longer, without selling himself to Falsehood, 
that he might ride in gilt carnages to Whitehall, and have 
clerks with bundles of papers hunting him, " Decide this, 
decide that," which in utmost sorrow of heart no man can 
perfectly decide ! What could gilt carriages do for this man? 
From of old, was there not in his life a weight of meaning, a 
terror and a splendor as of Heaven itself? His existence 
there as man set him beyond the need of gilding. Death, 
Judgment and Eternity : these already lay as the background 
of whatsoever he thought or did. All his life lay begirt as 
in a sea of nameless Thoughts, which no speech of a mortal 
could name. God's Word, as the Puritan prophets of that 



248 LECTURES ON- HEROES. 

time had read it: this was great, and all else was little to 
him. To call such a man "ambitious," to figure him as the 
prurient wind-bag described above, seems to me the poorest 
solecism. Such a man will say : " Keep your gilt carriages 
and huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks, your influen- 
tialities, your important businesses. Leave me alone, leave 
me alone; there is too much of life in me already!" Old 
Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England in his day, 
was not ambitious. " Corsica Boswell " flaunted at public 
shows with printed ribbons round his hat; but the great old 
Samuel staid at home. The world-wide soul wrapt up in 
its thoughts, in its sorrows; — what could paradings, and 
ribbons in the hat, do for it ? 

Ah yes, I will say again : The great silent men ! Looking 
round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little 
meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the 
great Empire of Silence. The noble silent men, scattered 
here and there, each in his department; silently thinking, 
silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes men- 
tion of! They are the salt of the Earth. A country that 
has none or few of these is in a bad way. Like a forest 
which had no roots ; which had all turned into leaves and 
boughs ; — which must soon wither and be no forest. Woe 
for us if we had nothing but what we can show., or speak. 
Silence, the great Empire of Silence : higher than the stars : 
deeper than the Kingdoms of Death! It alone is great; all 
else is small. — I hope we English will long maintain our 
grand talent pour le silence. Let others that cannot do 
without standing on barrel-heads, to spout, and be seen of 
all the market-place, cultivate speech exclusively, — become 
a most green forest without roots ! Solomon says, There is a 
time to speak; but also a time to keep silence. Of some 
great silent Samuel, not urged to writing, as old Samuel 



r 



I 




I 



" SILENCE, TtlE GREAT EMPIRE OF SILENCE: HIGHKR THAN 
THE STARS," — PaS^C 248. 



• THE HERO AS KING. 249 

Johnson sa3'S he was, by want of money ^ and nothing other, 
one might ask, " Why do not you too get up and speak ; prom- 
ulgate your system, found your sect?" "Truly," he will 
answer, " I am continent of my thought hitherto ; happily I 
have yet had the abihty to keep it in me, no compulsion 
strong enough to speak it. My " system " is not for promul- 
gation first of all ; it is for serving myself to live by. That 
is the great purpose of it to me. And then the " honor " .-^ 
Alas, yes ; — but as Cato said of the statue : So many statues 
in that Forum of yours, may it not be better if they ask, 

Where is Cato's statue ? " 

But now, by way of counterpoise to this of Silence, let 
me say that there are two kinds of ambition; one wholly 
blamable, the other laudable and inevitable. Nature has 
provided that the great silent Samuel shall not be silent 
too long. The selfish wish to shine over others, let it be 
accounted altogether poor and miserable. " Seekest thou 
great things, seek them not : " this is most true. And yet, I 
say, there is an irrepressible tendency in every man to de- 
velop himself according to the magnitude which Nature has 
made him of ; to speak out, to act out, what Nature has laid 
in him. This is proper, fit, inevitable ; nay it is a duty, and 
even the summary of duties for a man. The meaning of life 
here on earth might be defined as consisting in this : To 
unfold your self to work what thing you have the faculty for. 
It is a necessity for the human being, the first law of our 
existence. Coleridge beautifully remarks that the infant 
learns to speak by this necessity it feels. — We will say 
therefore: To decide about ambition, whether it is bad or 
not, you have two things to take into view. Not the cover- 
ing of the place alone, but the fitness of the man for the 
place withal : that is the question. Perhaps the place was 
his ; perhaps he had a natural right, and even obligation, to 



r 



250 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

seek the place ! Mirabeau's ambition to be Prime Minister, 
how shall we blame it, if he were " the only man in France 
that could have done any good there " ? Hopefuler perhaps 
had he not so clearly/^// how much good he could do ! But 
a poor Necker, who could do no good, and had even felt 
that he could do none, yet sitting broken-hearted because 
they had flung him out, and he was now quit of it, well might 
Gibbon mourn over him. — Nature, I say, has provided 
amply that the silent great man shall strive to speak withal ; 
too amply, rather ! 

Fancy, for example, you had revealed to the brave old 
Samuel Johnson, in his shrouded-up existence, that it was 
possible for him to do priceless divine work for his country 
and the whole world. That the perfect Heavenly Law might 
be made Law on this Earth : that the prayer he prayed daily, 
" Thy kingdom come," was at length to be fulfilled'.' If you 
had convinced his judgment of this; that it was possible, 
practicable ; that he the mournful silent Samuel was called 
to take a part in it ! Would not the whole soul of the man 
have flamed up into a divine clearness, into noble utterance 
and determination to act ; casting all sorrows and misgivings 
under his feet, counting all affliction and contradiction small, 
— the whole dark element of his existence blazing into 
articulate radiance of light and lightning? It were a true 
ambition this ! And think now how it actually was with 
Cromwell. From of old, the sufferings of God's Church, 
true zealous Preachers of the truth flung into dungeons, 
whipt, set on pillories, their ears cropt off, God's Gospel- 
cause trodden under foot of the unworthy : all this had lain 
heavy on his soul. Long years he had looked upon it, in 
silence, in prayer; seeing no remedy on Earth ; trusting well 
that a remedy in Heaven's goodness would come, —that 
such a course was false, unjust, and could not last forever. 



THE HERO AS KING. 2%l 

And now behold the dawn of it ; after twelve years silent 
waiting, all England stirs itself; there is to'be once more a 
Parliament, the Right will get a voice for itself : inexpressible 
well-grounded hope has come again into the Earth. Was 
not such a Parliament worth being a member of ? Cromwell 
threw down his ploughs, and hastened thither. 

He spoke there, — rugged bursts of earnestness, of a 
self-seen truth, where we get a glimpse of them. He worked 
there ; he fought and strove, like a strong true giant of a 
man, through cannon-tumult and all else, — on and on, till 
the Cause triumphed, its once so formidable enemies all 
swept from before it, and the dawn of hope had become clear 
light of victory and certainty. That he stood there as the 
strongest soul of England, the undisputed Hero of all Eng- 
land, — what of this ? It was possible that the Law of 
Christ's Gospel could now establish itself in the world ! 
The Theocracy which John Knox in his pulpit might dream 
of as a " devout imagination," this practical man, experi- 
enced in the whole chaos of most rough practice, dared to 
consider as capable of being realized. Those that were 
highest in Christ's Church, the devoutest wisest men, were 
to rule the land: in some considerable degree, it might be so 
and should be so. Was it not true., God's truth .? And if 
tnce, was it not then the very thing to do ? The strongest 
practical intellect in England dared to answer, Yes ! This I 
call a noble true purpose ; is it not, in its own dialect, the 
noblest that could enter into the heart of Statesman or man.'* 
For a Knox to take it up was something ; but for a Crom- 
well, with his great sound sense and experience of what our 
world was., — History, I think, shows it only this once in 
such a degree. I account it the culminating point of Protes- 
tantism ; the most heroic phasis that " Faith in the Bible " 
was appointed to exhibit here below. Fancy it ; that it were 



252 LECTURES OAT HEROES. 

made manifest to one of us, how we could make the Right 
supremely victorious over Wrong, and all that we had 
longed and prayed for, as the highest good to England and 
all lands, an attainable fact ! 

Well, I must say, the viiipbie intellect, with its knowing- 
ness, its alertness and expertness in " detecting hypocrites," 
seems to me a rather sorry business. We have had but one 
such Statesman in England ; one man, that I can get sight 
of, who ever had in the heart of him any such purpose at all. 
One man, in the course of fifteen hundred years ; and this 
was his welcome. He had adherents by the hundred or the 
ten ; opponents by the million. Had England rallied all round 
him, — why, then, England might have been a Christian 
land ! As it is, vulpine knowingness sits yet at its hopeless 
problem, " Given a world of Knaves, to educe an Honesty 
from their united action ; " — how cumbrous a problem, you 
may see in Chancery Law-Courts, and some other places ! 
Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but also by Heaven's 
great grace, the matter begins to stagnate ; and this problem 
is becoming to all men 2, palpably hopeless one. 

But with regard to Cromwell and his purposes : Hume, 
and a multitude following him, come upon me here with an 
admission that Cromwell was sincere at first ; a sincere 
" Fanatic V at first, but gradually became a " Hypocrite " as 
things opened round him. This of the Fanatic-Hypocrite 
is Hume's theory of it; extensively applied since, — to 
Mahomet and many others. Think of it seriously, you will 
find something in it; not much, not all, very far from all. 
Sincere hero hearts do not sink in this miserable manner. 
The Sun flings forth impurities, gets balefuUy incrusted with 
spots ; but it does not quench itself, and become no Sun at 
all, but a mass of Darkness ! I will venture to say that such 



THE HERO AS KING. 253 

never befell a great deep Cromwell ; I think, never. Nature's 
own lion-hearted Son ; Antseus-like, his strength is got by 
touching the Earth., his Mother ; lift him up from the Earth, 
hft him up into Hypocrisy, Inanity, his strength is gone. We 
will not assert that Cromwell was an immaculate man ; that 
he fell into no faults, no insincerities among the rest. He 
was no dilettante professor of " perfections," " immaculate 
conducts." He was* a rugged Orson, rending his rough way 
through actual true work., — doubtless with many a fall 
therein. Insincerities, faults, very many faults daily and 
hourly : it was too well known to him ; known to God and 
him ! The Sun was dimmed many a time ; but the Sun had 
not himself grown a Dimness. Cromwell's last words, as he 
lay waiting for death, are those of a Christian heroic man. 
Broken prayers to God, that He would judge him and this 
Cause, He since man could not, in justice yet in pity. They 
are most touching words. He breathed out his wild great 
soul, its toils and sins all ended now, into the presence of 
his Maker, in this manner. 

I, for one, will not call the man a Hypocrite ! Hypocrite, 
mummer, the life of him a mere theatricality ; empty 
barren quack, hungry for the shouts of mobs ? The man 
had made obscurity do very well for him till his head 
was gray ; and now he was., there as he stood recognized 
unblamed, the virtual King of England. Cannot a man do 
without King's Coaches and Cloaks ? Is it such a blessed- 
ness to have clerks forever pestering you with bundles of 
papers in red tape .'' A simple Diocletian prefers planting 
of cabbages ; a George Washington, no very immeasurable 
man, does the like. One would say, it is what any genuine 
man could do ; and would do. The instant his real work 
were out in the matter of Kingship, — away with it ! 

Let us remark, meanwhile, how indispensable everywhere 



I 



254 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

a King is, in all movements of men. It is strikingly shown, 
in this very War, what becomes of men when they cannot 
find a Chief Man, and their enemies can. The Scotch 
Nation was all but unanimous in Puritanism; zealous and of 
one mind about it, as in this English end of the Island was 
always far from being the case. But there was no great 
Cromwell among them ; poor tremulous, hesitating, diplo- 
matic Argyles and suchlike ; none of them had a heart true 
enough for the truth, or durst commit himself to the truth. 
They had no leader; and the scattered Cavalier party in that 
country had one : Montrose, the noblest of all the Cavaliers ; 
an accomplished, gallant-hearted, splendid man ; what one 
may call the Hero-Cavaher. Well, look at it; on the one 
hand subjects without a King; on the other a King without 
subjects ! The subjects without King can do nothing ; the 
subjectless King can do something. This Montrose, with a 
handful of Irish or Highland savages, few of them so much 
as guns in their hands, dashes at the drilled Puritan armies 
like a wild whirlwind ; sweeps them, time after time, some 
five times over, from the field before him. He was at one 
period, for a short while, master of all Scotland. One man; 
but he was a man : a million zealous men, but without the 
one ; they against him were powerless ! Perhaps of all the 
persons in that Puritan struggle, from first to last, the single 
indispensable one was verily Cromwell. To see and dare, and 
decide ; to be a fixed pillar in the welter of uncertainty ; — a 
King among them, whether they called him so or not. 

Precisely her'e, however, lies the rub for Cromwell. His 
other proceedings have all found advocates, and stand gen- 
erally justified ; but this dismissal of the Rump Parliament 
and assumption of the Protectorship, is what no one can 
pardon him. He had fairly grown to be King in England; 



» 



THE HERO AS KING. 255 

Chief Man of the victorious party in England: but it seems 
he could not do without the King's Cloak, and sold himself 
to perdition in order to get it. Let us see a little how this 
was. 

England, Scotland, Ireland, all lying now subdued at the 
feet of the Puritan Parliament, the practical question arose, 
What was to be done with it.'' How will you govern these 
Nations, which Providence in a wondrous way has given up 
to your disposal ? Clearly those hundred surviving members 
of the Long Parliament, who sit there as supreme authority, 
cannot continue forever to sit. What is to be done ? — 
It was a question which theoretical constitution-builders 
may find easy to answer; but to Cromwell, looking there 
into the real practical facts of it, there could be none more 
complicated. He asked of the Parliament, What it was 
they would decide upon .'' It was for the Parliament to say. 
Yet the Soldiers too, however contrary to Formula, they 
who had purchased this victory with their blood, it seemed 
to them that they also should have something to say in it ! 
We will not " For all our fighting have nothing but a little 
piece of paper." We understand that the Law of God's 
Gospel, to which He through us has given the victory., shall 
establish itself, or try to establish itself, in this land ! 

For three years, Cromwell says, this question had been 
sounded in the ears of the Parliament. They could make 
no answer; nothing but talk, talk. Perhaps it lies in the 
nature of parliamentary bodies ; perhaps no Parliament 
could in such case make any answer but even that of talk, 
talk i Nevertheless the question must and shall be answered. 
You sixty men there, becoming fast odious, even despicable, 
to the whole nation, whom the nation already calls Rump 
Parliament, ^^// cannot continue to sit there: who or what 
then is to follow? "Free Parliament," right of Election, 



256 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Constitutional Formulas of one sort or the other, — the 
thing is a hungry Fact coming on us, which we must answer 
or be devoured by it ! And who are you that prate of Con- 
stitutional Formulas, rights of Parliament ? You have had 
to kill your King, to make Pride's Purges, to expel and ban- 
ish by the law of the stronger whosoever would not let your 
Cause prosper : there are but fifty or threescore of you left 
there, debating in these days. Tell us what we shall do ; 
not in the way of Formula, but of practicable Fact ! 

How they did finally answer, remains obscure to this day. 
The diligent Godwin himself admits that he cannot make it 
out. The likeliest is, that this poor Parliament still would 
not, and indeed could not dissolve and disperse ; that when 
it came to the point of actually dispersing, they again, for 
the tenth or twentieth time, adjourned it, — and Cromwell's 
patience failed him. But we will take the favorablest 
hypothesis ever started for the Parliament ; the favorablest, 
though I believe it is not the true one, but too favorable. 

According to this version : At the uttermost crisis, when 
Cromwell and his Officers were met on the one hand, and 
the fifty or sixty Rump Members on the other, it was sud- 
denly told Cromwell that the Rump in its despair was 
answering in a very singular way; that in their splenetic 
envious despair, to keep out the Army at least, these men 
were hurrying through the House a kind of Reform Bill, — 
Parliament to be chosen by the whole of England ; equable 
electoral division into districts ; free suffrage, and the rest 
of it! A very questionable, or indeed for them an unques- 
tionable thing. Reform Bill, free suffrage of Englishmen? 
Why, the Royalists themselves, silenced indeed but not 
exterminated, perhaps OMiiiuinber us ; the great numerical 
majority of England was always indifferent to our Cause, 
merely looked at it and submitted to it. It is in weight and 



THE HERO AS KING. 2^ J 

force, not by counting of heads, that we are the majority ! 
And now with your Formulas and Reform Bills, the whole 
matter, sorely won by our swords, shall again launch itself 
to sea; become a mere hope, and likelihood, small (tvQ.\\ as 
a likelihood? And it is not a likelihood; it is a certainty, 
which we have won, by God's strength and our own right 
hands, and do now hold here. Cromwell walked down to 
these refractory Members ; interrupted them in that rapid 
speed of their Reform Bill; — ordered them to be gone, and 
talk there no more. — Can we not forgive him ? Can we not 
understand him ? John Milton, who looked on it all near at 
hand, could applaud him. The Reality had swept the For- 
mulas away before it. I fancy, most men who were realities 
in England might see into the necessity of that. 

The strong daring man, therefore, has set all manner of 
Formulas and logical superficialities against him; has dared 
appeal to the genuine Fact of this England, Whether it will 
kjrsupport him or not ? It is curious to see how he struggles 
to govern in some constitutional way ; find some Parliament 
to support him; but cannot. His first Parliament, the one 
they call Barebones's Parliament, is, so to speak, a Con- 
vocation of the Notables. From all quarters of England 
the leading Ministers and chief Puritan OfHcials nominate the 
men most distinguished by religious reputation, influence 
and attachment to the true Cause : these are assembled to 
shape out a plan. They sanctioned what was past; shaped 
as they could what was to come. They were scornfully 
called Barebones's Parlia?nent : the man's name, it seems, 
was not Barebones^ but Barbone, — a good enough man. 
Nor was it a jest, their work ; it was a most serious reality, 
— a trial on the part of these Puritan Notables how far the 
Law of Christ could become the Law of this England. 
There were men of sense among them, men of some quality; 



258 LECTURES ON HEROES, 

men of deep piety I suppose the most of them were. They 
failed, it seems, and broke down, endeavoring to reform the 
Court of Chancery ! They dissolved themselves, as incom- 
petent ; delivered up their power again into the hands of the 
Lord General Cromwell, to do with it what he liked and 
could. 

What will he do with it ? The . Lord General Cromwell, 
" Commander-in-chief of all the Forces raised and to be 
raised;" he hereby sees himself, at this unexampled junc- 
ture, as it were the one available Authority left in England, 
nothing between England and utter Anarchy but him alone. 
Such is the undeniable Fact of his position and England's, 
there and then. What will he do with it? After delibera- 
tion, he decides that he will accept it; will formally^ with 
pubhc solemnity, say and vow before God and men, "Yes, 
the Fact is so, and I will do the best I can with it ! " Pro- 
tectorship, Instrument of Government, — these are the exter- 
nal forms of the thing ; worked out and sanctioned as they 
could in the circumstances be, by the Judges, by the leading 
Official people, " Council of Officers and Persons of interest 
in the Nation : " and as for the thing itself, undeniably 
enough, at the pass matters had now come to, there was no 
alternative but Anarchy or that. Puritan England might 
accept it or not; but Puritan England was, in real truth, 
saved from suicide thereby ! — I beHeve the Puritan People 
did, in an inarticulate, grumbling, yet on the whole grateful 
and real way, accept this anomalous act of Oliver's ; at 
least, he and they together made it good, and always better 
to the last. But in their Parliamentary articulate way, 
they had their difficulties, and never knew fully what to say 
to it! 

Oliver's second Parliament, properly his Jirst regular Par- 
liament, chosen by the rule laid down in the Instrument of 



► 




CROMWELL AND HIS MOTHER. — i°^r^^ 262. 



THE HERO AS KING. 259 

Government, did assemble, and worked ; — but got, before 
long, into bottomless questions as to the Protector's right, 
as to "usurpation," and so forth; and had at the earliest 
legal day to be dismissed. Cromwell's concluding Speech 
to these men is a remarkable one. So likewise to his third 
Parliament, in similar rebuke for their pedantries and obsti- 
nacies. Most rude, chaotic, all these Speeches are ; but 
most earnest-looking. You would say, it was a sincere 
helpless man ; not used to speak the great inorganic thought 
of him, but to act it rather ! A helplessness of utterance, 
in such bursting fulness of meaning. He talks much about 
" births of Providence : " All these changes, so many victo- 
ries and events, were not forethoughts, and theatrical con- 
trivances of men, of me or of men; it is blind blasphemers 
that will persist in calhng them so ! He insists with a heavy 
sulphurous wrathful emphasis on this. As he well might. 
As if a Cromwell in that dark huge game he had been play- 
ing, the world wholly thrown into chaos round him, had 
foreseen it all, and played it all off like a precontrived puppet- 
show by wood and wire ! These things were foreseen by no 
man, he says ; no man could tell what a day would bring 
forth : they were " births of Providence," God's finger guided 
us on, and we came at last to clear height of victory, God's 
Cause triumphant in these Nations ; and you as a Parha- 
ment could assemble together, and say in what manner all 
this could be organized, reduced into rational feasibility 
among the affairs of men. You were to help with your wise 
counsel in doing that. " You have had such an opportunity 
as no Parliament in England ever had." Christ's Law, the 
Right and True, was to be in some measure made the Law 
of this land. In place of that, you have got into your idle 
pedantries, constitutionalities, bottomless cavillings and ques- 
tionings about written laws for my coming here ; — and 



26o LECTURES ON HEROES. 

would send the whole matter in Chaos again, because I have 
no Notary's parchment, but only God's voice from the battle- 
whirlwind, for being President among you ! That opportu- 
nity is gone ; and we know not when it will return. You have 
had your constitutional Logic ; and Mammon's Law, not 
Christ's Law, rules yet in this land. " God be judge between 
you and me ! " These are his final words to them ; Take you 
your constitution-formulas in your hand ; and I my zV/formal 
struggles, purposes, realities and acts ; and " God be judge 
between you and me ! " 

We said above what shapeless, involved chaotic things 
the printed Speeches of Cromwell are. Wilfully ambigu- 
ous, unintelligible, say the most : a hypocrite shrouding 
himself in confused Jesuitic jargon ! To me they do not 
seem so. I will say rather, they afforded the first glimpses 
I could ever get into the reality of this Cromwell, nay into 
the possibility of him. Try to beheve that he means some- 
thing, search lovingly what that may be : you will find a real 
speech lying imprisoned in these broken rude tortuous utter- 
ances ; a meaning in the great heart of this inarticulate man ! 
You will, for the first time, begin to see that he was a man ; 
not an enigmatic chimera, unintelligible to you, incredible 
to you. The Histories and Biographies written of this 
Cromwell, written in shallow sceptical generations that could 
not know or conceive of a deep believing man, are far more 
obscure than Cromwell's Speeches. You look through them 
only into the infinite vague of Black and the Inane. " Heats 
and jealousies," says Lord Clarendon himself: "heats and 
jealousies," mere crabbed whims, theories and crotchets ; 
these induced slow sober quiet Englishmen to lay down their 
ploughs and work; and fly into red fury of confused war 
against the best-conditioned of Kings ! Tiy if you can find 
that true. Scepticism writing about Belief may have great 



\ 



THE HERO AS k'ING. 26 1 

gifts; but it is really ?///;'« vires there. It is Blindness 
laying down the Laws of Optics. 

Cromwell's third Parliament split on the same rock as his 
second. Ever the constitutional Formula : How came j'07i 
there ? Show us some Notary parchment ! Blind pedants : 
— " Why, surely the same power which makes you a Parlia- 
ment, that, and something more, made me a Protector! " If 
my Protectorship is nothing, what in the name of wonder is 
your Parliamenteership, a reflex and creation of that ? 

Parliaments having failed, there remained nothing but the 
way of Despotism. Mihtary Dictators, each with his dis- 
trict, to coerce the Royalist and other gainsayers, to govern 
them, if not by act of Parliament, then by the sword. For- 
mula shall not carry it, while the Reality is here ! I will go 
on, protecting oppressed Protestants abroad, appointing just 
judges, wise managers, at home, cherishing true Gospel 
ministers ; doing the best I can to make England a Chris- 
tian England, greater than old Rome, the Queen of Protes- 
tant Christianity ; I, since you will not help me ; I while 
God leaves me life ! — Why did he not give it up ; retire into 
obscurity again, since the Law would not acknowledge him? 
cry several. That is where they mistake. For him there 
was no giving of it up! Prime Ministers have governed 
countries, Pitt, Pombal, Choiseul ; and their word was a law 
while it held : but this Prime Minister was one that could 
not get resigned. Let him once resign, Charles Stuart and 
the Cavaliers waited to kill him; to kill the Cause and\\\vcs.. 
Once embarked, there is no retreat, no return. This Prime 
Minister could 7'etire no-whither except into his tomb. 

One is sorry for Cromwell in his old days. His complaint 
is incessant of the heavy burden Providence has laid on 
him. Heavy ; which he must bear till death. Old Colonel 
Hutchinson, as his wife relates it, Hutchinson, his old battle- 



262 LECTURES OM HEROES. 

mate, coming to see him on some indispensable business, 
much against his will, — Cromwell " follows him to the door,"' 
in a most fraternal, domestic, conciliatory style : begs that 
he would be reconciled to him, his old brother in arms ; says 
how much it grieves him to be misunderstood, deserted by 
true fellow-soldiers, dear to him from of old : the rigorous 
Hutchinson, cased in his Rej)ubHcan formula, sullenly goes 
his wa}^ — And the man's head now white ; his strong arm 
growing weary with its long work ! I think always too of 
his poor Mother, now very old, living in that Palace of his ; 
a right brave woman •, as indeed they lived all an honest 
God-fearing Household there : if she heard a shot go off, she 
thought it w^as her son killed. He had to come to her at 
least once a day, that she might see with her own eyes that 

he ivas yet living. The poor old Mother ! What had 

this man gained ; what had he gained ? He had a life of 
sore strife and toil, to his last day. Fame, ambition, place in 
History? His dead body was hung in chains; his ''place 
in History," — place in History forsooth ! — has been a place 
of ignominy, accusation, blackness and disgrace ; and here, 
this day, who knows if it is not rash in me to be among the 
first that ever ventured to pronounce him not a knave and 
liar, but a genuinely honest man ! Peace to him. Did he 
not, in spite of all, accomplish much for us ? We walk 
smoothly over his great rough heroic life ; step over his body 
sunk in the ditch there. We need not spurn it, as we step 
on it! — Let the Hero rest. It was not to men's judgment 
that he appealed ; nor have men judged him very well. 

Precisely a century and a year after this of Puritanism 
had got itself hushed up into decent composure, and its 
results made smooth, in 1688, there broke out a far deeper 
explosion, much more difficult to hush up, known to all 



¥/ 




i' RETURN OF MANKIND TO REALITY AND FACT." — Pag^e 263, 



THE HERO AS KING. 263 

mortals, ahd like to be long known, by the name of French 
Revolution. It is properly the third and final act of Protes- 
tantism ; the explosive confused return of mankind to Real- 
ity and Fact, now that they were perishing of Semblance and 
Sham. We call our English Puritanism the second act: 
" Well then, the Bible is true ; let us go by the Bible ! " " In 
Church," said Luther; "In Church and State," said Crom- 
well, "let us go by what actually is God's Truth." Men 
have to return to reality; they cannot live on semblance. 
The French Revolution, or third act, we may well call the 
final one ; for lower than that savage Sansculottism men 
cannot go. They stand there on the nakedest haggard Fact, 
undeniable in all seasons and circumstances ; and may and 
must begin again confidently to build up from that. The 
French explosion, like the English one, got its King, — who 
had no Notary parchment to show for himself. We have 
still to glance for a moment at Napoleon, our second modern 
King. 

Napoleon does by no means seem to me so great a man 
as Cromwell. His enormous victories which reached over 
all Europe, while Cromwell abode mainly in our little Eng- 
land, are but as the high stilts on which the man is seen 
standing; the stature of the man is not altered thereby. 1 
find in him no such sincerity as in Cromwell ; only a far 
inferior sort. No silent walking, through long years, with 
the Awful Unnamable of this Universe ; " walking with 
God," as he called it ; and faith and strength in that alone : 
latent thought and valor, content to lie latent, then burst out 
as in blaze of Heaven's lightning! Napoleon lived in an 
age when God was no longer believed ; the meaning of all 
Silence, Latency, was thought to be Nonentity: he had to 
begin not out of the Puritan Bible, but out of poor Sceptical 
Encyclopedies. This was the length the man carried it 



264 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

Meritorious to get so far. His compact, prompt, every way 
articulate character is in itself perhaps small, compared with 
our great chaotic //zarticulate Cromwell's. Instead of '■'■ dumb 
Prophet struggling to speak," we have a portentous mixture 
of the Quack withal! Hume's notion of the Fanatic-H3'po- 
crite, with such truth as it has, will apply much better to 
Napoleon than it did to Cromwell, to Mahomet or the like, 
— where indeed taken strictly it has hardly any truth at all. 
An element of blamable ambition shows itself, from the first, 
in this man ; gets the victory over him at last, and involves 
him and his work in ruin. 

" False as a bulletin " became a proverb in Napoleon's 
time. He makes what excuse he could for it : that it was 
necessary to mislead the enemy, to keep up his own men's 
courage, and so forth. On the whole, there are no excuses. 
A man in no case has liberty to tell hes. It had been, in the 
long run, better for Napoleon too if he had not told any. In 
fact, if a man have any purpose reaching beyond the hour 
and day, meant to be found extant next day, what good can 
it ever be to promulgate lies? The hes are found out; 
ruinous penalty is exacted for them. No man will believe 
the liar next time even when he speaks truth, when it is of the 
last importance that he be believed. The old cry of wolf ! — 
A Lie is «^-thing; you cannot of nothing make something; 
.you make nothing at last, and lose your labor into the 
bargain. 

Yet Napoleon had a sincerity : we are to distinguish 
between what is superficial and what is fundamental in insin- 
cerity. Across these outer manoeuvrings and quackeries of 
his, which were many and most blamable, let us discern 
withal that the man had a certain instinctive ineradicable 
feeling for reality ; and did base himself upon fact, so long 
as he had any basis. He has an instinct of Nature better 



THE HERO AS K/JVG. 265 

than his culture was. His savans, Bourrienne tells us, in 
that voyage to Egypt were one evening busily occupied 
arguing that there could be no God. They had proved it, 
to their satisfaction, by all manner of logic. Napoleon look- 
ing up into the stars, answers, "Very ingenious, Messieurs: 
but who made all that ? " The Atheistic logic runs off from 
him like water ; the great Fact stares him in the face : 
"Who made all that?" So too in Practice: he, as every 
man that can be great, or have victory in this world, sees, 
through all entanglements, the practical heart of the matter ; 
drives straight towards that. When the steward of his 
Tuileries Palace was exhibiting the new upholstery, with 
praises, and demonstration how glorious it was, and how 
cheap withal. Napoleon, making little answer, asked for a 
pair of scissors, dipt one of the gold tassels from a window- 
curtain, put it in his pocket, and walked on. Some days 
afterwards, he produced it at the right moment, to the horror 
of his upholstery functionary; it was not gold but tinsel! 
In Saint Helena, it is notable how he still, to his last days, 
insists on the practical, the real. " Why talk and complain ; 
above all, why quarrel with one another? There is no result 
in it ; it comes to nothing that one can do. Say nothing, if 
one man can do nothing ! "' He speaks often so, to his poor 
discontented followers ; he is like a piece of silent strength 
in the middle of their morbid querulousness there. 

And accordingly was there not what we call a faith in 
him, genuine so far as it went? That this new enormous 
Democracy asserting itself here in the French Revolution is 
an insuppressible Fact, which the whole world, with its old 
forces and institutions, cannot put down ; this was a true 
insight of his, and took his conscience and enthusiasm along 
with it, — 2^ faith. And did he not interpret the dim pur- 
port of it well ? " La carriere ouverte aux talens^ The 



266 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

implements to him who can handle them : "this actually is 
the truth, and even the whole truth ; it includes whatever the 
French Revolution, or any Revolution, could mean. Napo- 
leon, in his first period, was a true Democrat. And yet by 
the nature of him, fostered too by his military trade, he knew 
that Democracy, if it were a true thing at all, could not be 
an anarchy : the man had a heart-hatred for anarchy. On 
that Twentieth of June ( 1792), Bourrienne and he sat in a 
coffee-house, as the mob rolled by : Napoleon expresses the 
deepest contempt for persons in authority that they do not 
restrain this rabble. On the Tenth of August he wonders 
why there is no man to command these poor Swiss ; they 
would conquer if there were. Such a faith in Democracy, 
yet hatred of anarchy, it is that carries Napoleon through all 
his great work. Through his brilliant Italian Campaigns, 
onwards to the Peace of Leoben, one would say, his inspira- 
tion is : " Triumph to the French Revolution ; assertion of 
it against these Austrian Simulacra that pretend to call it a 
Simulacrum ! " Withal, however, he feels, and has a right 
to feel, how necessary a strong Authority is ; how the Revo- 
lution cannot prosper or last without such. To bridle in 
that great devouring, self-devouring French Revolution ; to 
tame it, so that its intrinsic purpose can be made good, that 
it may become organic, and be able to live among other or- 
ganisms and formed things, not as a wasting destruction 
alone : is not this still what he partly aimed at, as the true 
purport of his life ; nay what he actually managed to do ? 
through Wagrams, Austerlitzes ; triumph after triumph, — he 
triumphed so far. There was an eye to see in this man, a 
soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All 
men saw that he was such. The common soldiers used to 
say on the march: "These babbling^ '^/<?^rt/i", up at Paris; 
all talk and no work. What wonder it runs all wrong .? 



THE HERO AS KING. ^6y 

We shall have to go and put our Petit Caporal there ! " 
They went, and put him there ; they and France at large. 
Chief -consulship, Emperorship, victory over Europe ; — till 
the poor Lieutenant of La Fere, not unnaturally, might seem 
to himself the greatest of all men that had been in the world 
for some ages. 

But at this point, I think, the fatal charlatan-element got 
the upper hand. He apostatized from his old faith in Facts, 
took to believing in Semblances ; strove to connect himself 
with Austrian Dynasties, Popedoms, with the old false Feu- 
dalities which he once saw clearly to be false ; — considered 
that he would found " his Dynasty " and so forth ; that the 
enormous French Revolution meant only that! The man 
was "given up to strong delusion, that he should believe a 
lie ; " a fearful but most sure thing. He did not know true 
from false now when he looked at them, — the fearfulest 
penalty a man pays for yielding to untruth of heart. Self 
and false ambition had now become his god : j^^-deception 
once yielded to, all other deceptions follow naturally more 
and more. What a paltry patchwork of theatrical paper- 
mantles, tinsel and mummery, had this man wrapt his own 
^■reat reality in, thinking to make it more real thereby ! His 
hollow Yo^^€ ^-Concordat, pretending to be a re-establish- 
ment of Catholicism, felt by himself to be the method of 
extirpating it, " /^ vaccine de la religion r' his ceremonial 
Coronations, consecrations by the old Italian Chimera in 
Notre-Dame, — "wanting nothing to complete the pomp of 
it," as Augereau said, "nothing but the half-million of men 
who had died to put an end to all that" ! Cromwell's Inau- 
guration was by the Sword and Bible ; what we must call a 
genuinely true one. Sword and Bible were borne before 
him, without any chimera: were not these the real emblems 
of Puritanism; its true decoration and insignia? It had 



26^ 



LECTURES OIV HEROES. 



used them both in a very real manner, and pretended to 
stand by them now! But this poor Napoleon mistook: he 
believed too much in the Dupeability of men ; saw no fact 
deeper in man than Hunger and this ! He was mistaken. 
Like a man that should build upon cloud; his house and 
he fall down in confused wreck, and depart out of the 
vv^orld. 

Alas, in all of us this charlatan-element exists ; and 7}dgJit 
be developed, were the temptation strong enough. " Lead 
us not into temptation " ! But it is fatal, I say, that it be 
developed. The thing into which it enters as a cognizable 
ingredient is doomed to be altogether transitory ; and, how- 
ever huge it may look, is in itself small. Napoleon's working, 
accordingly, what was it with all the noise it made.'* A flash 
as of gunpowder widespread ; a blazing-up as of dry heath. 
For an hour the whole Universe seems wrapt in smoke and 
flame; but only for an hour. It goes out: the Universe 
with its old mountains and streams, its stars above and kind 
soil beneath, is still there. 



The Duke of Weimar told his friends always, To be of 
courage ; this Napoleonism was unjust, a falsehood, and 
could not last. It is true doctrine. The heavier this Napo- 
leon trampled on the world, holding it tyrannously down, the 
fiercer would the world's recoil against him be, one day. 
Injustice pays itself with frightful compound-interest. I am 
not sure but he had better have lost his best park of artillery, 
or had his best regiment drowned in the sea, than shot tha': 
poor German Bookseller, Palm ' It was a palpable tyran- 
nous murderous injustice, which no man, let him paint an 
inch thick, could make out to be other. It burnt deep into 
the hearts of men, it and the like of it ; suppressed fire 
flashed in the eyes of men, as they thought of it, — waiting 




NAPOLEON. — Fa^e 26^ 



THE HERO AS KING. 269 

their day ! Which day came : Germany rose round him. — 
What Napoleon 6/zd will in the long run amount to what he 
did justly J what Nature with her laws will sanction. To 
what of reality was in him; to that and nothing more. The 
rest was all smoke and waste. La carriere ouverte aitx 
talens : that great true Message, which has yet to articulate 
and fulfil itself everywhere, he left in a most inarticulate 
state. He was a great ebaucJie^ a rude-draught never com- 
pleted ; as indeed what great man is other ? Left in too rude 
a state, alas ! 

His notions of the world, as he expresses them there at 
St. Helena, are almost tragical to consider. He seems to 
feel the most unaffected surprise that it has all gone so; 
that he is flung out on the rock here, and the World is still 
moving on its axis. France is great, and all-great; and at 
bottom, he is France. England itself, he says, is by Nature 
only an appendage of France ; " another Isle of Oleron to 
France." So it was by Nature, by Napoleon-Nature ; and 
yet look how in fact — Here am I ! He cannot understand 
it', inconceivable that the reality has not corresponded to his 
-programme of it; that France was not all-great, that he was 
not France. *' Strong delusion," that he should believe the 
thing to be which is not ! The compact, clear-seeing, deci- 
sive Italian nature of him, strong, genuine, which he once 
had, has enveloped itself, half-dissolved itself, in a turbid 
atmosphere of French fanfaronade. The world was not dis- 
posed to be trodden down under foot; to be bound into 
masses, and built together, as he liked, for a pedestal to 
France and him : the world had quite other purposes in view ! 
Napoleon's astonishment is extreme. But alas, what help 
now? He had gone that way of his; and Nature also had 
gone her way. Having once parted with Reality, he tumbles 
helpless in Vacuity; no rescue for him. He had tQ sink 



2/0 LECTURES ON HEROES. 

there, mournfully as man seldom did ; and break his great 
heart, and die, — this poor Napoleon : a great implement too 
soon wasted, till it was useless : our last Great Man ! 

Our last, in a double sense. For here finally these wide 
roamings of ours through so many times and places, in 
search and study of Heroes, are to terminate. I am sorry 
for it: there was pleasure for me in this business, if also 
much pain. It is a great subject, and a most grave and 
wide one, this which, not to be too grave about it, I have 
named Hero-worship. It enters deeply, as I think, into the 
secret of Mankind's ways and vitalest interests in this world, 
and is well worth explaining at present. With six months, 
instead of six days, we might have done better. I promised 
to break ground on it ; I know not whether I have even 
managed to do that. I have had to tear it up in the rudest 
manner in order to get into it at all. Often enough, with 
these abrupt utterances thrown out isolated, unexplained, 
has your tolerance been put to the trial. Tolerance, patient 
candor, all-hoping favor and kindness, which I will not speak 
of at present. The accomplished and distinguished, the 
beautiful, the wise, something of what is best in England, 
have listened patiently to my rude words. With many feel- 
irjgs, I heartily thank you all; and say. Good be with you 
all! 



SUMMARY. 



LECTURE L 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. ODIN. PAGANISM: SCANDINAVIAN 

MYIHOLOGV. 

HEROES : Universal History consists essentially of their 
united Biographies. Religion not a man's church-creed, but 
his practical belief about himself and the Universe : Both with 
Men and Nations it is the One fact about them which creatively 
determines all the rest. Heathenism: Christianity: Modern 
Scepticism. The Hero as Divinity. Paganism a fact ; not 
Quackery, nor Allegory: Not to be pretentiously " Explained;" 
to be looked at as old Thought, and with sympathy, (p. i.) — 
Nature no more seems divine except to the Prophet or Poet, 
because men have ceased to think : To the Pagan Thinker, as to 
a child-man, all was either godlike or God. Canopus : Man 
Hero-worship the basis of Religion, Loyalty, Society. A Hero 
not the " creature of the time ; " Hero-worship indestructible. 
Johnson; Voltaire. (8.) — Scandinavian Paganism the Religion of 
our Fathers. Iceland, the home of the Norse Poets, described. 
The Edc/a. The primary characteristic of Norse Paganism, the 
impersonation of the visible workings of Nature. Jotuns and the 
Gods. Fire: Frost: Thunder: The Sun ; Sea-Tempest. Mythus 
of the Creation: The Life-Tree Igdrasil. The modern "-Machine 
of the Universe," (17.) — The Norse Creed, as recorded, the sum- 

__ 271 



2J2 SUMMARY. 

mat ion of several successive systems: Originally the shape given 
to the national thought by their first "Man of Genius." Odin' 
He has no history or date ; yet was no mere adjective, but a man 
of flesh and blood. How deified. The World of Nature, to every 
man a Fantasy of Himself. ( 23.) — Odin the inventor of Runes, of 
Letters and Poetry. His reception as a Hero : the pattern Norse- 
man ; a God: His shadow over the whole History of his People. 
(30.) —The essence of Norse Paganism, not so much Morality, as 
a sincere recognition of Nature: Sincerity better than Graceful- 
ness. The Allegories, the after-creations of the Faith. Main 
practical Belief : Hall of Odin: Valkyrs: Destiny: Necessity of 
Valor. Its worth : Their Sea-Kings, Woodcutter Kings, our spirit* 
ual Progenitors. The growth of Odinism. (33.) — The strong sim- 
plicity of Norse lore quite unrecognized by Gray. Thor's veritable 
Norse rage : Balder, the white Sungod. How the old Norse heart 
loves the Thunder-god, and sports with him: Huge Brobdignag 
genius, needing only to be tamed down, into Shakspeares, 
Goethes. Truth in the Norse Songs : This World a show. 
Thor's Invasion of Jotunheim. The Ragnarok, or Twilight of the 
Gods : The Old must die, that the New and Better may be born. 
Thor's last appearance. The Norse Creed a Consecration of 
Valor. It and the whole Past a possession of the Present. (38.) 



LECTURE 11. 

THE HERO AS PROPHET. MAHOMET : ISLAM. 

The Hero no longer regarded as a God, but as one god-inspired. 
All Heroes primarily of the same stuff; differing according to 
their reception. The welcome of its Heroes, the truest test of an 
epoch. Odin: Burns, (p. 47.) — Mahomet a true Prophet; not a 
scheming Impostor. A Great Man, and therefore first of all a 
sincere man : No man to be judged merely by his faults. David 



SUMMARY. 273 

the Hebrew King. Of all acts for man repentance the most divine : 
The deadliest sin, a supercilious consciousness of none. (49) — 
Arabia described. The Arabs always a gifted people ; of wild 
strong feelings, and of iron restraint over these. Their Religios- 
ity: Their Star-worship- Their Prophets and inspired men; from 
Job downwards. Their Holy Places. Mecca, its site, history and 
government. (53.) — Mahomet. His youth : His fond Grandfather. 
Had no book-learning; Travels to the Syrian F'airs ^ and first 
comes in contact with the Christian Religion. An altogether 
solid, brotherly, genuine man: A good laugh, and a good flash of 
anger in him withal. (57.) — Marries Kadijah. Begins his Prophet- 
career at forty years of age. Allah Akbar ; God is great : Islam ; 
we must submit to God. Do we not all live in Islam? Mahomet, 
"the Prophet of God." (60.) — The good Kadijah believes in 
him; Mahomet's gratitude.' His slow progress : Among forty of 
his kindred, young Ali alone joined him. His good Uncle expos- 
tulates with him- Mahomet, bursting into tears, persists in his 
mission. The Hegira. Propagating by the .sword : First get your 
sword : A thing will propagate itself as it can. Nature a just 
umpire. Mahomet's Creed unspeakably better than the wooden 
idolatries and jangling Syrian Sects extirpated by it. (64.) — The 
Koran, the universal standard of Mahometan life ; An imper- 
fectly, badly written, but genuine book : Enthusiastic extempore 
preaching, amid the hot haste of wrestling with flesh-and-blood 
and spiritual enemies. Its direct poetic insight. The World, Man, 
human Compassion; all wholly miraculous to Mahomet. (71.) — 
His religion did not succeed by "being easy:" None can. The 
sensual part of it not of Mahomet's making. He himself, frugal ; 
patched his own clothes ; proved a hero in a rough actual trial of 
twenty-three years. Traits of his generosity and resignation. His 
total freedom from cant. (78.) — His moral precepts not always of 
the superfinest.sort; yet is there always a tendency to good in 
them. His Heaven and Hell sensual, yet not altogether so. 
Infinite Nature of Duty. The evil of sensuality, in the slavery to 
pleasant things, not In the enjoyment of them. Mahometanism a 



274 SUMMARY. 

religion heartily believed. To the Arab Nation it was as j? birth 

from darkness into light: Arabia first became alive by means of 
it. (82.) 



LECTURE III. 

THE HERO AS POET. DANTE; SHAKSPEARE. 

The Hero as Divinity or Prophet, inconsistent with the modern 
progress of science : The Hero Poet, a figure common to all ages. 
All Heroes at bottom the same; the different sphere co\\<,i\tw\!vc\^ 
the grand distinction: Examples. Varieties of aptitude, (p. 87.) 
— Poet and Prophet meet in Vates : Their Gospel the same, for 
the Beautiful and the Good are one. Xll men somewhat of poets ; 
and the highest Poets far from perfect. Prose, and Poetry or 
musical Thought. Song a kind of inarticulate unfathomable 
speech: All deep things are Song. The Hero as Divinity, as 
Prophet, and then only as Poet, no indication that our estimate of 
the Great Man is diminishing : The Poet seems to be losing caste, 
but it is rather that our notions of God are rising higher. (89.) — 
Shakspeare and Dante, Saints of Poetry. Dante ; His history, in 
his Book and Portrait. His scholastic education, and its fruit of 
subtlety. His miseries ; Love of Beatrice : His marriage not happv, 
A banished man : Will never return, if to plead guilty be the condi- 
tion. His wanderings : ^''Comeednrocalle.'''' At the Court of Delia 
Scala. The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made its home 
more and more in Eternity. His mystic, unfathomable Song. 
Death : Buried at Ravenna. (95 ) — His Divina Commedia a Song : 
Go deep enough, there is music everywhere. The sincerest of Poems: 
It has all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. Its 
Intensity, and Pictorial power. The three parts make up the true 
Unseen World of the Middle Ages : How the Christian Dante 
felt Good and Evil to be the two polar elements of this Creation. 
Paganism and Christianism. (100.) — Ten silent centuries found a 



SUMMARY. 275 

voice in Dante. The thing that is uttered from the inmost parts 
of a man's soul differs altogether from what is uttered by the 
outer. The " uses " of Dante : We will not estimate the Sun by 
the quantity of gas it saves us. Mahomet and Dante contrasted. 
Let a man do his work; ih^ fruit of it is the care of Another than 
he. (109.) — As Dante embodies musically the Inner Life of the 
Middle Ages, so does Shakspeare embody the Outer Life which 
grew therefrom. The strange outbudding of English Existence 
which we call " Elizabethan Era." Shakspeare the chief of all 
Poets : His calm, all-seeing Intellect : His marvellous Portrait- 
painting. (112.) — The Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he 
have intellect enough, — that he be able to see. Intellect the sum- 
mary of all human gifts : Human intellect and vulpine intellect con- 
trasted. Shakspeare's instinctive unconscious greatness : His 
works a part of Nature, and partaking of her inexhaustible depth. 
Shakspeare greater than Dante ; in that he not only sorrowed, but 
triumphed over his sorrows. His mirthfulness, and genuine over- 
flowing love of laughter. His Historical Plays, a kind of National 
Epic. The Battle of Agincourt : A noble Patriotism, far other than 
the " indifference " sometimes ascribed to him. Plis works, like so 
jhany windows, through which we see glimpses of the world that 
fs in him. (115.) — Dante the melodious Priest of Middle-Age 
Catholicism : Out of this Shakspeare too there rises a kind of 
Universal Psalm, not unfit to make itself heard among still more 
sacred Psalms. Shakspeare an " unconscious Prophet ; " and 
therein greater and truer than Mahomet. This poor Warwick- 
shire peasant worth more to us than a whole regiment of highest 
Dignitaries: Indian Empire, or Shakspeare, — which? An Eng- 
lish King, whom no time or chance can dethrone : A rallying-sign 
and bond of brotherhood for all Saxondom : Wheresoever English 
men and women are, they will say to one another, *' Yes, this 
Shakspeare is ours T'' (123.) 



2/6 SUMMARY. 



LECTURE IV. 

THE HERO AS PRIEST. LUTHER ; REFORMATION : KNOX ; 
PURITANISM. 

The Priest a kind of Prophet; but more familiar as the daily 
enlightener of daily life. A true Reformer he who appeals to 
Heaven's invisible justice against Earth's visible force. The 
finished Poet often a symptom that his epoch itself has reached 
perfection, and finished. Alas, the battling Reformer, too, is at 
times a needful and inevitable phenome^non : Offences do accumu- 
late, till they become insupportable. Forms of Belief, modes of 
life, must perish ; yet the Good of the Past survives, an everlast- 
ing possession for us all. (p. 128.) — Idols, or visible recognized 
Symbols, common to all Religions: Hateful only when insincere: 
The property of every Hero, that he come back to sincerity, to 
reality: Protestantism and " private judgment." No living com- 
munion possible among men who believe only in hearsays. The 
Hero-Teacher, who delivers men out of darkness into light. Not 
abolition of Hero-worship does Protestantism mean; but rather a 
whole World of Pleroes, of sincere, believing men. ( [34.) — Luther ; 
his obscure, seemingly insignificant birth. His youth schooled in 
adversity and stern reality. Becomes a Monk. His religious 
despair : Discovers a Latin Bible ; No wonder he should venerate 
the Bible. He visits Rome. Meets the Pope's fire by fire. At 
the Diet of Worms : The greatest moment in the modern History 
of men. (142.) — The Wars that followed are not to be charged to 
the Reformation. The Old Religion once true : The cry of " No 
Popery " foolish enough in these days. Protestantism not dead : 
German Literature and the French Revolution rather considerable 
signs of life! (151.) — How Luther held the sovereignty of the 
Reformation and kept Peace while he lived. His written Works : 
Their rugged homely strength : His dialect became the language 
of all writing. No mortal heart to be called braver^ ever lived in 



SUMMARY. 277 

that Teutonic Kindred, whose character is valor : Yet a most 
gentle heart withal, full of pity and love, as the truly valiant heart 
ever is: Traits of character from his Table-Talk : His daughter's 
Deathbed : The miraculous in Nature. His love of Music. His 
Portrait. (153.) — Puritanism the only basis of Protestantism that 
ripened into a living faith: Defective enough, but genuine. Its 
fruit in the world. The sailing of the Mayflower from Delft 
Haven the beginning of American Saxondom. In the history 
of Scotland properly but one epoch of world-interest, — the Ref- 
ormation by Knox : A " nation of heroes ; " a believi7ig nation. 
The Puritanism of Scotland became that of England, of New Eng- 
land. (159.) — Knox "guilty" of being the bravest of all Scotch- 
men : Did not seek the post of Prophet. At the siege of St. 
Andrew's Castle. Emphatically a sincere man. A Galley-slave 
on the River Loire. An Old-Hebrew Prophet, in the guise of an 
Edinburgh Minister of the Sixteenth Century. (163.) — Knox and 
Queen Mary: "Who are you, that presume to school the nobles 
and sovereign of this realm?" — "Madam, a subject born within 
the same." His intolerance — of falsehoods and knaveries. Not a 
mean acrid man ; else he had never been virtual President and 
Sovereign of Scotland. His unexpected vein of drollery: A 
cheery social man; practical, cautious-hopeful, patient. His 
" devout imagination " of a Theocracy, or Government of God. 
Hildebrand wished a Theocracy; Cromwell wished it., fought for 
it : Mahomet attained it. In one form or other, it is the one thing 
to be struggled for. (166.) 



LECTURE V. 

THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, BURNS. 

The Hero as Man of Letters altogether a product of these new 
ages; A Heroic Soul in very strange guise. Literary men; gen- 
uine and spurious. Fichte's "Divine Idea of the World:" His 



278 SUMMARY. 

notion of the True Man of Letters. Goethe, the Pattern Literary 
Hero. (p. 171.) — The disorganized condition of Literature, the 
summary of all other modern disorganizations. The Writer of a 
true Book our true modern Preacher. Miraculous influence of 
Books: The Hebrew Bible. Books are now our actual Univer- 
sity, our Church, our Parliament. With Books, Democracy is 
inevitable. Thought the true thaumaturgic influence, by which 
man works all things whatsoever. (176.) — Organization of the 
"Literary Guild:" Needful discipline; "priceless lessons" of 
Poverty. The Literary Priesthood, and its importance to society. 
Chinese Literary Governors. Fallen into strange times; and 
strange things need to be speculated upon. (184.) — An age of 
Scepticism: The very possibility of Heroism formally abnegated. 
Benthamism an eyeless Heroism. Scepticism, Spiritual Paralysis, 
Insincerity: Heroes gone out; Quacks come in. Oar brave 
ChaUiam himself lived the strangest mimetic life all along. Vio- 
lent remedial revulsions: Chartisms, French Revolutions: The 
Age of Scepticism passing away. Let each Man look to the 
mending of his own Life, (188.) — Johnson one of our Great Eng- 
lish Souls. His miserable Youth and Hypochondria: Stubborn 
Self-help. His loyal submission to what is really higher than 
himself. How he stood by the old Formulas : Not less original 
for that. Formulas ; their Use and Abuse. Johnson's uncon- 
scious sincerity. His -Twofold Gospel, a kind of Moral Prudence 
and clear Hatred of Cant. His writings sincere and full of 
substance. Architectural nobleness of his Dictionary: Boswell, 
with all his faults, a true hero-worshipper of a true Hero. (198.) — 
Rousseau a morbid, excitable, spasmodic man ; intense rather than 
strong. Had not the invaluable "talent of Silence." His Face 
expressive of his character. His Egoism : Hungry for the praises 
of men. His books : Passionate appeals, which did once more 
struggle towards Reality: A Prophet to his Time; as he could, 
and as the Time could. Rosepink, and artificial bedizenment. 
Fretted, exasperated, till the heart of him went mad : He could 
be cooped, starving, into garrets; laughed at as a maniac; but he 



SUMMARY. 2*J<) 

could not be hindered from setting the world on fire. (205.) — 
Burns a genuine Hero, in a witinered, unbelieving, secondhand 
Century. The largest soul of all the British lands, came among 
us in the shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant. His heroic 
Father and Mother, and their sore struggle through life. His 
rough untutored dialect : Affectionate joyousness. His writings a 
poor fragment of him. His conversational gifts : High duchesses 
and low hostlers alike fascinated by him. (209.) — Resemblance 
between Burns and Mirabeau. Official Superiors : The greatest 
"thinking-faculty" in this land superciliously dispensed with. 
Hero-worship under strange conditions. The notablest phasis of 
Burns's history his visit to Edinburgh. For one man who can 
stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity. 
Literary Lionism. (212.) 



LECTURE IV. 

THE HERO AS KINCx. CROMWELL, NAPOLEON : MODERN 
REVOLUTIONISM. 

The King the most important of Great Men ; the summary of 
all the various figures of Heroism. To enthrone the Ablest Man, 
the true business of all Social procedure: the Ideal of Constitu- 
tions. Tolerable and intolerable approximations. Divine Rights 
and Diabolic Wrongs, (p. 217.) — The world's sad predicament; 
that of having its Able-Man to seek, and not knowing in what 
manner to proceed about it. The era of Modern Revolutionism 
dates from Luther. The French Revolution no mere act of Gen- 
eral Insanity: Truth clad in hell-fire; the Trump of Doom to 
Plausibilities and empty Routine. The cry of " Liberty and 
Equality" at bottom the repudiation of sham Heroes. Hero- 
worship exists forever and everywhere ; from divine adoration 
down to the common courtesies of man and man: The soul of 
Order, to which all things, Revolutions included, work. Some 



2 So SUMMARY. 

Cromwell or Napoleon the necessary finish of a Sansculottism. The 
manner in which Kings were made, and Kingship itself first took 
rise. (221.) — Puritanism a section of the universal war of Belief 
against Make-believe. I.aud a weak ill-starred Pedant : in his spas- 
modic vehemence heeding no voice of prudence, no cry^ of pity. 
Universal necessity for true Forms : How to distinguish between 
True and False. The nakedest Reality preferable to any empty Sem- 
blance, however dignified. (226.) — The work of the Puritans. The 
Sceptical Eighteenth century, and its constitutional estimate of 
Cromwell and his associates. No wish to disparage such charac- 
ters as Hampden, Eliot, Pym ; a most constitutional, unblamable, 
dignified set of men. The rugged outcast Cromwell, the man of 
them all in whom one still finds human stuff. The One thing 
worth revolting for. (229.) — Cromwell's "hypocrisy" an impos- 
sible theory. His pious Life as a Farmer until forty years of age. 
His public successes honest successes of a brave man. His par- 
ticipation in the King's death no ground of condemnation. His 
eye for facts no hypocrite's gift. His Ironsides the embodiment 
of this insight of his. (234.) — Know the men that may be trusted : 
Alas, this is yet, in these days, very far from us. Cromwell's 
hypochondria : His reputed confusion of speech : His habit of 
prayer. His speeches unpremeditated and full of meaning. His 
reticences; called "lying" and "dissimulation:" Not one false- 
hood proved against him, (240.) — Foolish charge of " ambition." 
The great Empire of Silence : Noble silent men, scattered here 
and there, each in his department ; silently thinking, silently hop- 
ing, silently working. Two kinds of ambition ; one wholly blam- 
able, the other laudable, inevitable : How it actually was with 
Ci"omwell. (245.) — Hume's Fanatic-Hypocrite theory. How indis- 
pensable everywhere a King is, in all movements of men. Crom- 
well, as King of Puritanism, of England. Constitutional palaver : 
Dismissal of the Rump Parliament. Cromwell's Parliaments and 
Protectorship : Parliaments having failed, there remained nothing 
for him but the way of Despotism. His closing days : His poor 
©Id Mother. It was not to men's judgments that he appealed \ 



I 



SUMMARY. 281 

nor have men judged him very well. (252.) — The French Revolu- 
tion, the " third act " of Protestantism. Napoleon, infected with 
the quackeries of his age : Had a kind of sincerity, — an instinct 
towards \\i& practical. W\s faith, — "The Tools to him tha*t can 
handle them," the whole truth of Democracy. His heart-hatred 
of Anarchy. Finally, his cjuackeries got the upper hand : He 
would found a " Dynasty : " Believed wholly in the dupeability of 
Men. This Napoleonism was unjust, a falsehood, and could not 
last. (263.) 



INDEX. 



Agincourt, Shakspeare*s battle of, 122. 

Ali, young, Mahomet's kinsman and 
convert, 65. * 

Allegory, the sportful shadow of earnest 
Faith, 6, 34. 

Ambition, foolish charge of, 246; lauda- 
ble ambition, 249. 

Arabia and the Arabs, 53. 

Balder, the white Sungod, 20, 38. 

Belief, the true god-announcing miracle, 
64, 86, 161, 193; war of, 226. See 
Religion, Scepticism. 

Benthamism, 85, 191. 

Books, miraculous influence of, 177, 183; 
our modern University, Church and 
Parliament, 180. 

Bos well, 203. 

Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, 7. 

Burns, 209 ; his birth and humble heroic 
parents, 209; rustic dialect, 210; the 
most gifted British soul of his century, 
211; resemblance to Mirabeau, 212; 
his sincerity, 214; his visit to Edin- 
burgh, Lion-hunted to death, 215. 

Caabah, the, with its'Black Stone and 

sacred Well, 55. 
Canopus, worship of, 10. 
Charles I. fatally incapable of being 

dealt with, 237. 
China, literary governors of, 187. 



Church. See Books. 

Cromwell, 230; his hypochondria, 255, 
241 ; early marriage and conversion ; 
a quiet farmer, 235; his Ironsides, 238; 
his Speeches, 243, 260; his " ambi- 
tion," and the like, 245; dismisses the 
Rump Parliament, 254, Protectorship 
and Parliamentary Futilities, 258; his 
last days and closing sorrows, 262. 

Dante, 95; biography in his Book and 
Portrait, 96; his birth, education, and 
earthly career, 96, 97 ; love for Beatrice, 
unhappy marriage, banishment, 97; 
uncourtier-like ways, 99; death, 100; 
his Divina Commedia genuinely a 
song, loi ; the Unseen World, as fig- 
ured in the Christianity of the Middle 
Ages, 107; " uses" of Dante, in. 

David, the Hebrew King, 52. 

Divine Right of Kings, 219. 

Duty, 34, 71; infinite nature of, 84; 
sceptical spiritual paralysis, 198. 

Edda, the Scandinavian, 18. 
Eighteenth Century, the sceptical, 188- 

197, 230. 
Elizabethan Era, 113. 

Faults, his, not the criterion of any man 

52. 
Fichte's theory of literary men, 173. 
283 



284 



INDEX. 



Fire, miraculous nature of, 19. 
Forms, necessity for, 228. 
Frost. See Fire. 

Goethe's "characters," 117; notablest 

of literary men, 175. 
Graphic, secret of being, 103. 
Gray's misconception of Norse lore, 38. 

Hampden, 230. 

Heroes, Universal History the united 
biographies of, i, 32; how "little 
critics" account for great men, 15; 
all Heroes fundamentally of the same 
stuff, 31, 48, 88, 128, 171, 211; Hero- 
ism possible to all, 141, 161; Intellect 
the primary outfit, 117; no man a hero 
to a valet-%o\A, 204, 230, 240. 

Hero-worship the tap-root of all Reli- 
gion, 12-17, 48. perennial in man, 15, 
94, 141, 225. 

Hutchinson and Cromwell, 230, 261. 

Iceland, the home of Norse Poets, 18. 

Idolatry, 134; criminal only when insin- 
cere, 136. 

Igdrasil, the Life-Tree, 22, 113. 

Intellect, the summary of man's gifts, 
118, 18S. 

Islam, 62. 

Job, the Book of, 54. 

Johnson's difficulties, poverty, hypo- 
chondria, 198; rude self-help; stands 
genuinely by the old formulas, 199; 
his noble unconscious sincerity, 201 ; 
twofold Gospel, of Prudence and 
hatred of Cant, 202; his Dictionary, 
203 ; the brave old Samuel, 204, 250. 

Jotuns, 19, 39. 

Kadijah, the good, Mahomet's first Wife, 
60, 64. 



King, the, a summary of all the various 
figures of Heroism, 217; indispensa- 
ble in all movements of men, 253. 

Knox's influence on Scotland, 161 ; the 
bravest of Scotchmen, 163; his unas- 
suming career; is sent to the French 
Galleys, 164; his colloquies with Queen 
Mary, 166; vein of drollery; a brother 
to high and to low; his death, 168, 169 

Koran, the, 71. 

Lamaism, Grand, 5. 

Leo X., the elegant Pagan Pope, 147. 

Liberty and Equality, 141, 224. 

Literary men, 171; in China, 187. 

Literature, chaotic condition of, 176; 
not our heaviest evil, 189. 

Luther's birth and parentage, 142; hard- 
ship and rigorous necessity; death of 
Alexis; becomes monk, 143, 144; his 
religious despair; finds a Bible; de- 
liverance from darkness, 144, 145; 
Rome, Tetzel, 147; burns the Pope's 
Bull, 148; at the Diet of Worms, 149; 
King of the Reformation, 153; " Duke 
Georges nine days running," 156; his 
little daughter's deathbed; his solitary 
Patmos, 157; his Portrait, 158. 

Mahomet's birth, boyhood, and youth, 
57; marries Kadijah, 60; quiet, un- 
ambitious life, 60; divine commission, 
62; the good Kadijah believes him; 
Seid; young Ali, 64, 65 : offences and 
sore struggles, 66; flight from Mecca; 
being driven to take the sword, he 
uses it, 67, 68 : the Koran, 71 ; a verita- 
ble Hero, 80; Seid's death, 80; Free- 
dom from Cant, 80; the infinite nature 
of Duty, 84. 

Mary, Queen, and Knox, 165. 

Mayflower, sailing of the, 150. 

Mecca, 56. 



INDEX. 



285 



Middle Ages, represented by Dante and 

Shakspeare, 108, 112. 
Montrose, the Hero-Cavalier, 254. 
Musical, all deep things, 93. 

Napoleon, a portentous mixture of 
Quack and Hero, 264; his instinct for 
the practical, 265: his democratic 
faith, and heart-haired for anarchy, 
265, 266; apostatized from his old faith 
in facts, and took to believing in Sem- 
blances, 267; this Napoleonism was 
unjust, and could not last, 268. 

Nature, all one great Miracle, 8, 76, 157 ; 
a righteous umpire, 69. 

Novalis, on Man, II ; Belief, 64; Shak- 
speare, 120. 

Odin, the first Norse " man of genius," 
23; historic rumors and guesses, 24; 
how he came to be deified, 27; in- 
vented " runes," 30; Hero, Prophet, 
God, 31. 

Olaf, King, and Thor, 44. 

Original man the sincere man, 51, 140. 

Paganism, Scandinavian, 4: not mere 
Allegory, 6; Nature-worship, 8, 33; | 
Hero-worship, 12; creed of our fathers, 
17, 40, 43; Impersonation of the visi- j 
ble workings of Nature, 19: contrasted 
with Greek Paganism, 21; the first 
Norse Thinker, 23; main practical 
Belief; indispensable to be brave, 34, 
35; hearty, homely, rugged Mythol- 
ogy; Balder, Thor, 33, Consecration 
of Valor, 45. 

Parliaments, superseded by Books, 182; 
Cromwell's Parliaments, 255. 

Past, the whole, the possession of the 
Present, 45. 

Poet, the, and Prophet, 89, in, 123. 

Poetry and Prose, distinction of, 92, loi. 



Popery, 152. 

Poverty, advantage, of, 143. 

Priest, the true, a kind of Prophet, 128, 

Printing, consequences of, 182. 

Private judgment, 138. 

Progress of the Species, 131. 

Prose. See Poetry. 

Protestantism, the root of Modern 
European History, 137; not dead yet, 
152; its living fruit, 159, 221. 

Purgatory, noble Catholic conception of, 
106. 

Puritanism, founded by Knox, 159; true 
beginning of America, 160; the one 
epoch of Scotland, 161 ; Theocracy, 
169; Puritanism in England, 226, 228, 
250. 

Quackery, originates nothing, 5, 49: age 
of, 194; Quacks and Dupes, 239, 240. 

Ragnarok, 43. 

Reformer, the true, 128. 

Religion, a man's, the chief fact with re- 
gard to him, 2; based on Hero-wor- 
sliip, 12; propagating by the sword, 
68; cannot succeed by being " easy," 
78. 

Revolution, 218; the French, 221, 263. 

Richter, 10. 

Right and. Wrong, 84, 108. 

Rousseau, not a strong man ; his Portrait; 
egoism, 205, 206; his passionate ap- 
peals, 207; his 'Books, like himself, 
unhealthy; the Evangelist of the 
French Revolution, 207, 208. 

Scepticism, a spiritual paralysis, 189- 

i95» 230. 
Scotland awakened into life by* Knox, 

161. 
Secret, the open, 89. 
Seid, Mahomet's slave and friend, 65, 80 



286 



INDEX. 



Shakspeare and the Elizabethan Era, 
113; his all-sufficing intellect, 115, it8; 
his Characters, 117; his Dramas, a 
part of Nature herself, 120; his joyful 
tranquillity, and overflowing love of 
laughter, 121; his hearty Patriotism, 
122; glimpses of the world that was 
in him, 1E3; a heaven-sent Light- 
Bringer, 124; a King of Saxondom, 
126. 

Shekinah, Man the true, 11. 

Silence, the great empire of, 112, 
248. 

Sincerity, better than gracefulness, 34 ; 
the first characteristic of heroism and 
originality, 50, 60, 140, 141, 173. 

Theocracy, a, striven for by^ all true 

Reformers, 170, 251. 
I'hor and his adventures, 20, 38-43 ; his 

last appearance, 44. 



Thought, miraculous influence of, 24, 

31, 183; 7«2/jzVrt/ Thought, 92. 
Thunder. See Thor. 
Time, the great mystery of, 9. 
Tolerance, true and false, 154, 160. 
Turenne, 88. 

Universities, 178. 

Valor, the basis of all virtue, 35, 39; 

Norse consecration of, 45; Christian 

valor, 133. 
Voltaire- worship, 15. 

Wish, the Norse god, 20 ; enlarged intc 

a heaven by Mahomet, 85. 
Worms, Luther at, 149. 
Worship, transccndent,wonder, 10. Be 

Hero-worship. 

Zemzem, the sacred Well, ^ 



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